I tear the military form and I start to write to his lover by hand, as I did in days gone by when the soul would let itself unravel upon the page.
I had a meeting with death each day, and he was the only soldier to be still enthralled with life in the evenings. He would smile with his large eyes - after it's all over, I'll bring her here so she could see the silvered forest, it's an otherworldly glow, we are killing its beauty by not observing it. He didn't die, really, he just melted away into a dark silhouette at dusk, and out there, from beyond the sun, he asks us to make peace in the war with ourselves, at dawn.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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 September 2021, the group has 7.150 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. 
