At first, he couldn't understand. What had he done wrong, why him, why now. His right palm ached from all the slaps he had given God. Then he calmed down. Maybe he needed his eyes to see the world better. They made the boxes out of wood, with no spaces between them. They filled the whole room. He slowly stepped into the first one. The barefoot sole whispered: sand. Sea. Seagull. The second one: fine moss and dry leaves. Forest. Primroses and mushrooms. And a deer. Then earth covered with grass. He lay down and fell asleep like a fetus, with a slight smile.
(Translated by Lenuța Bejenaru / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
