In farthest Siberia, with a large bottle of vodka in his hand, Ivan trembled. His life is a tiring routine, an eternal hunger, an eternal cold wind. Her face is cracked, her hands are dry, her nails are black. Eat little and drink a lot. Now, after not knowing how many years, his body is shaking all the time. Ivan came out on the porch only in his shirt. He sat down in the snow. He closed his eyes, laughing with tears. A pleasant numbness soon enveloped him. With his eyes closed, now he was smiling. It was warm, he could hear the sea, he could see a light. He was free.
(Translated by Georgiana Carmen Rădulescu / 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. 
