I tried a corpse left to the maggots. And I screamed six feet underground. I pushed at the lid of the coffin for a long time. But to no avail. The oak boards are holding up. I can feel warm maggots crawling around through my cold and rotten flesh. I can also feel the darkness around, but only as a velvet shroud that seems to be pulling me back into nothingness. And to think I've only had the role for a few months and I'm already identifying with my character. Art demands sacrifice, that's why I work
part-time at the cemetery.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
