It's nighttime. I take a shortcut home, through the cornfield. I hum a song I invented while the moon and stars lumber up above me. All of a sudden, I come across a tall guy in a huge hat. I get scared. I see a wooden stick at my feet. I grab it from the ground and hit the guy with it as hard as I can. The man is knocked out cold. I sprint away, running for my life. In the morning, I went back to that spot, to see whether I'd committed some atrocity. I had destroyed the neighbour's scarecrow.
(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. 
