I smiled foolishly and hoarsely in the euphoria of the burial from which I had risen, gently knocking down the little crows that were circling me, cackling childishly. I patted them gently between their unripe wings, whispering to them the masterly crafted secret and leaving them cack on the Sisyphean boulder which I carried tightly between my shoulders for centuries of seconds. I straightened my forehead and my loins, I opened the door of the glided bird cage, and I came out serenely, locking it behind me without a trace of regret and resentment in its slowly diminishing murmur.
(Translated by Marius-Alin Lazăr / 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 March 2022, the group has 8,050 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. 
