A man dressed in a suit shouts through a megaphone in the middle of a colourless meadow: We're protecting ourselves. From the grass, towards the sky, bodies of old men, women and children start rising. In the same colourless meadow, another man in a suit shouts out to the other, we're protecting ourselves. From the sky, towards the ground, it rains old people, women and children running afraid to nowhere. At the end of the meadow, people and saints stand silent, trying to understand what could've been done differently. Beyond people and saints, drone factories, missiles and shields stand tall.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
