There were shifting sands, and knew it would swallow her. At first it caught his feet. She thought she had taken root, but in fact she was trapped in a girdle where she sank softly. After a few years, their hearts pounded, barely beating. Then the mouth. The sand hid between her teeth and under her tongue. She was talking jerkily. She was just saying nothing. Then it reached to her eyes and everything looked dark and colourless. She didn't try to move. She stayed under him. Mute. Inert. Then a willow rose from it.
(Translated by Laura-Elena Dobrin / 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 January 2022, the group has 7.830 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. 
