It was a dark, terrible night when I left home. Barks and sobs filled the air. The last thing I saw was her, feeding the children. I kissed the ground, I embraced each of them, I hugged the trees, our small house and I was on my way. I walked for days on end, I climbed mountains, I slept in forests. I can no longer tell day from night, hunger from thirst. This is all I have left from home: a piece of lead, a sheet of paper and a strand of her hair. It's raining bullets, and I'm face down in the trenches.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruţă-Tănăsescu / 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. 
