At the end of the day, the old woman spilled the remains of unwritten deeds back into the inkpot. She'd heard around the village that Writing On The Wall was looking for her to demand his tribute. She didn't believe in him. She thought him a fantasy, but the villagers were harrowed by the thought of him. They found evidence for him in everything: the rain that didn't fall, in the hail that did, in the accidents in the field. People, he is not real, she would tell them on Sunday gatherings. He is real, and he is wrecking havoc, Ileana. But Ileana was stubborn about it and would write down on white pages the days that were about to come.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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. 
