With gloomy steps she had gone out the door, looking with her pearly eyes for someone's serenity but only the chirping of a sparrow that had lost its babies in the croaking of a lame cat reigned around. She took three more steps and heard her name called from the fourth floor of the block where she lived. Arriving there, she only saw a black cat that smiled at her and said: Ottilia, run! The faster the little girl ran on the asymmetrical steps, the harder the small creature grinned. Run, run. At home, the silence lingered in her voice until today.
(Translated by Andreea Denisa Dinu / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
