We are hiding in cellars. I am not quite sure how much we will bear it. Luckily, our neighbour from the fourth floor, who suffers from OCD made hundreds and hundreds of vegetable stew jars. We counted them and shared them per capita. Children receive just half of the quantity even though they are in their growth phase. Now they only need to survive, the growth comes afterwards. School is not open anymore. We tell them stories. Today is my turn. What will I tell them to keep their hopes up? One week ago I told them about a group of people who were writing fiction.
(Translated by Roberta Ana-Maria Gulerez / 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. 
