The door opens with a macabre creak. From somewhere from above, a cold, blue light relentlessly turns on. There is an ominous rumbling. The hungry monster rummages through the packaging. OK, end of the line for us. He's going to eat us. I saw my family perish, one by one, foully snatched directly from the jar. I can't take it anymore. Well, yeah, Nelu. We're two olives crumpled at the bottom of the jar, you're only pips and stalks, you'll die of old age before anyone looks at you.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
