I had finished digging the trenches with my comrades, when my brother came with the news that I was getting older and my hope was hardening. Here, on the front line, you don't think about tomorrow. You live or you die. I sigh and ask for a cigarette. I light it. I smell musty and heavy, just like wet and dirty clothes. What did you find out? Tell me, what did your brother tell you? You are her living mother. There's nobody in the back. Do you hear? No one. We have no reinforcements. They left us in the will of the Lord. I do not end the thought that the machine guns start firing. Tomorrow? Which tomorrow?
(Translated by Laura-Elena Dobrin / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
