The first day of autumn arrived late in the restless village. Tired and sweating, she stopped to catch her breath near the first house before drowning the entire settlement. A warm sunset adorned with multicolored patches approached her slowly from behind. The animals minded their own business, the birds minded their own wings, and people minded other people's businesses. Children were running noisily, lifting the dust behind them, turning it into a yellow, translucent mist. Everything was in place. But no one, absolutely no one counted the chickens.
(Translated by Alexandra Lica / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
