The bleeding of the trees moves the sympathy in my groins and throws it onto the voices that are building me an ash crib. In the village, the women birth stillborns, for the angels leave them before they're born, not wanting them to come into a world of larceny. My soul is leaving and my hollow corpse will start to rot, nibbled at by ants. Amongst my bones will grow weeds and the oblivion will devour the shell of my soul. I have been the lone sentinel of a proud and lush forest, I hope I won't be reborn a Wallachian tree.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
