Sometimes death is a mercy. I'm tracking him down with a sniper's rifle. I take my watch out of my pocket. The ticking gives me the cadence of my breath. I write the first word that comes to my mind. Justice. I'm swallowing, the abrasive dryness gives me the signal of my pulse lowering. The index finger strokes the trigger slowly. I stare at the mountain of panting meat sitting on a bench. His insipid existence will cease to exist with a single click. He is looking at a group of children playing in a sand pit. I'm not God, I'm better. I shoot. The no. 400 paedophile is dead.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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. 
