If I walk along the water stream, the thief catchers will lose my track, he thought. The river took a turn forward where the water was deeper and there snorted the horse and stopped with trembling nostrils. The man jumped in the water, caught the horse by the harness and continued analyzing the shore with his stare. When the girl's naked body sprung up from the river's wavy depths, man and horse turned into stones. A ray of moon was enough so that her fleeting beauty would burn the outlaw's soul. He let go of the horse and the catch, and took the way of another temptation.
(Translated by Mara-Sabina Rolea / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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. 
