Gelu didn't only have one shadow like everybody else. He had tens of them. The morning one was tired and barely keeping up with him when going to work. At around 8 o'clock, there was a stiff one, like a telegraph pole. The boss was checking up on it. By noon there was another one, limp and bored. The one from 3 o'clock was tapping its foot angrily because time wasn't passing by quickly enough. The unforgettable one was the midnight one, when Gelu fell asleep for good in a ditch. It is said that the shadow danced so beautifully in the gutter among the snowflakes that no one even believed Gelu was no more.
(Translated by Marta Fulga / 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. 
