I'm looking back and there's no trace of courage. I would have broken your nose when you touched my daughter. Instead, I looked down because you were drunk. I would have broken your windshield and popped your wheels with an axe. Instead, I looked down because you were drunk. I would have scalped you and put out one of your eyes because you were beating us to a pulp. Instead, I looked down because you were drunk. I would have chased you bare feet on the street with a knife because you raped her. But I looked down because I was a coward. But not today.
(Translated by Bianca-Andreea Rîmboacă / 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. 
