Come on, you'll make it, it's not hard. You go back to the pain's ground zero, from where all your smiles took off running. Close your eyes and follow me. Cover your eyes so you won't see the flowers and the trees anymore, step over the wrecks' dust, don't listen to the sweet birdsongs. You're now in trance. You only hear the sound of bullets, your flesh shivers at the sound of children weeping and you plunge to the ground, so you don't see the heartbreaking pain of the mourning mothers in despair. No. I don't want to. It's too much. I want to wake up.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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. 
