Take the last subway. Don't look anyone in the eye. Breathe normally. Count to ten when you inhale and to ten when you exhale. Have a short pause between your inhale and exhale and make sure your weapon is loaded. At the first stop, get down. Wait for it to be exactly fixed hour. Don't use your phone to check it, but the one at the station. You'll recognize it by the scarf. Make sure there aren't many passengers on the platform and shoot it. When you're done, you draw a door in the air, then step through it. Your particles will be reunited at home.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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. 
