Or have I not sacrificed the bull and dedicated its skin in strips to the gods? Or do I not lead a hundred thousand Carthaginians and forty elephants? Or did I not cross the Alps, sleeping naked on the ground? Or did I not burn the rock with vinegar, and it crumbled? Or am I not today at the gates of Rome? And do you look back upon the dead and doubt me? But Maharbal opened the breast of his sword, hissing: you shalt not win, if though you know how to earn a victory, for you know not how to enjoy peace. And they still did not win.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / 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. 
