The woman felt lost in the crowd. Every face was different, and from everywhere she could hear words she did not understand. She no longer recognized anything from where she had grown up. It now seemed just a noisy, sinister copy that almost scared her. The world had changed. We all go, but she remains and transforms. With that in mind, she stepped into the cathedral. She sat shyly on a bench and let her soul be swayed by the organ music. She wanted life to stop right there, but with a sigh, she accepted that such a thing was impossible.
(Translated by Andreea-Simona Trufin / 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. 
