There was no one to stop me. I leaned over the grave, and I shouldn't have, for I saw what the others couldn't. Where they had thrown flowers, I saw bones. I had rained then; they were matted with dirt and moist-smelling. I bent over too far, but a terrible curiosity had made me come closer; I wasn't expecting flowers to grow out of the bones. There was sunshine outside, a cold one, but I still felt as if it was raining and that those laughing bones got tangled, forming an exit ladder from the grave, which moved towards me to throw me in there, inside.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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.