In the winter, the beasts were coming down from the jungle and were crossing the frozen river. I was crawling following the steps, sensing the air and guessing black silhouettes behind the trees, on the other bank. In the night, like an Allah of adventure to a childish Mohammed, Jules Verne was dictating to my father what we would explore tomorrow. At 12 o'clock, my mother was asking telepathically: what you hunted today, to cook? Suddenly, the scent of the beast was hiding into a smell of polenta with milk. I was going to the bank, and I was erasing my own traces with my scarf, as not to be found by maturity.
(Translated by Alexandra Cica / 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. 
