Her enthusiasm quickly turned into wonder and she stopped looking confused: a few children were wading in a small pool and another large one was full of adults. The high walls sunk into the dark sky, they were covered with screens which projected flames. A man looking as if he was cut out from a masked ball walked towards her smiling: Welcome to Hell, I see you got your accessories, come. A glimmer of hope crept into her soul, but as she was dipping the tip of her hoof in the blackness of the pool, she realized: There is not even a trace of tar. Mud. Only mud.
(Translated by Ioana Negrea / 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. 
