In the belly of the field, Ilie felt alive and time seemed to fly by. In this field where the village's dough was born, today he thought bitterly of what was to come. How was he supposed to protect his work now that they were rumored to be replacing his corn with genetically modified corn. He didn't agree, but who listened to a poor peasant. But weren't they all peasants, including the mayor, who had been born in a house like his? He had heard him talk about progress, but what progress had to do with his hard work, he did not understand.
(Translated by Medeea Alexandra Stan / 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. 
