The sky was so low and heavy that I was forced to lie down on the ground to fit in. I don't know when so many cranes had gathered on the misty clouds. They had formed a circle around me, as if they were waiting for me to surrender to the red crowns like the dream that was bleeding from my feet. I would have held on to the wings, if I had known that this was the salvation. The subversive thought carried me back in time. The cigarette dropped on the carpet, the flames, Miruna, the doll's horribly round and scared eyes, the damn smiley on the fridge saying: I'm quitting tomorrow.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / 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. 
