I was searching for the ground, but found myself skidding, like an exhausted ballerina slipping on wire. I was reaching out, my hands like featherless wings, clinging silently to the air between us, like a wounded bird which, in her fall, tries to cling to the sky. Pinned to the wall, I could feel his fingers digging tightly into my neck,
ever-stronger. Release came out of nowhere. At the end of the hallway, a
five-year-old voice cried out to him: "What are you doing to my mom?". Collapsing, I admired the innocence closed tight in her fists. She could still ward off evil. Still.
(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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
