Why the hell did he have to be a prison guard? He grinned at the barbed-wire serpentine-nailed to the walls and remembered his first day in the watchtower when he felt like a God, hehe. Now he wondered where the walls began and ended, who was guarding whom. At the end of his shift, he took a shortcut through the green and quiet field. He almost stumbled over a child who had fallen asleep while guarding his sheep, and at that moment a burden was lifted off his chest. He lay down beside him and guarded his sleep.
(Translated by Lenuța Bejenaru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
