They are warming my hands, vibrating towards my shoulders, and gathering me in a ball of ecstasy. That is the only way I can open them up and search through their contents. I sieve the
human-smelling ash. I touch mandibles burned by kisses and ribs calcined by feelings. I put aside teeth, buttons, sometimes bullets and send them in white envelopes to the relatives. In the sieve, I often find longings that were too fiery to have been devoured by the heat of the flames. I blow them, and their floating is what Columbus is to the peace of a black person.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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 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. 
