We are sitting in trenches, wet, waiting for our turn, surrounded by the barbed wire that is kissing our salty cheeks. The sacks filled with hopes and unburnt love shelter us from the blast of hot metal melting over the chilled and horrified bodies, and covers us in a bed of bullets and worms. We line up the dead in a firing position under the rocking song of the bangs, like some adversary venomous snakes. And God is looking at us with His big, war comrade eyes, from the icon craved in the gray May sky.
(Translated by Delia-Maria Cocoș / 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 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. 
