The clatter of his teeth signals the cold settling in his bones, and the raindrops fall as heavy as boulders on his skin, shredding his wounded body and burying it in a grave of green corn husks. He lies hidden, guarded by hungry worms waiting to devour his carcass, and hopes for salvation. Gravely wounded and abandoned behind enemy lines for three days, he no longer believes there is any escaping. But it seems that the country girl who had come to work her fields ends his suffering with the skilled blow of a shovel to his sleeping head.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / 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. 
