When the Liumier brothers arrived in town, the circus filled up immediately. The screen lit up with the decelerated movement of the knife sliding across the human neck. Then it reddened with the blood squirted on the inside. Then it went off. The audience clamored angrily: some because such an abomination could not be tolerated; others because it ended too fast. But everyone was asking for their money back, unaware of the pungent gas that pervaded from under the doors closed by Oscar. They hurried to trample each other. It was short.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Denisa Neagu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In June 2021, the group has 6.650 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
