Once, spring had been ushered in on a gust of wind. The blue, glassy sky and no birds. Mother hands her two white pills. They gave us some at school as well, she says. Take them, other kids didn't get this chance. Why? Because I say so, now go inside. She sees her insulating the windows using
band-aids. Too hot for the month of May and she's still glued to the window. But when everyone is asleep, she goes out to the yard. The wind is blowing, carrying the cloud towards the faraway North. The curtain draws today and she feels something growing inside her. Fear.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Ciucașu / 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 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. 
