Imagine you are on a beach. Ok. What beach? Where? I'm on an island. What island? You lay down on the beach and breathe. Wait a little, I don't see the beach. Just breathe. I'm going to seat on the sand or do I have a towel, chair or something? Is the sun shining directly on me or I have shadow? Do I have SPF 50, because my skin gets burned fast, I'll get sunburned and then I'm going to die of skin cancer. Listen to the waves. I only hear tsunami waves and there are the worms of the dunes in the sand. Relax. Why did I think of worms? Close your eyes. Noo. Huge tsunamis and worms. (Un)good night.
(Translated by Ioana Negrea / 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 February 2022, the group has 7,950 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.