The pain was eating them alive. Behind the closed doors, the annoying Chun-hua's laugh was filling the room and the air there didn't encourage anyone to live any longer. She was hungrily smoking from an opium pipe and suddenly the night turned into morning, the children were running and shouting. They were careless about Time as in the middle of the day they were earning coins and glory in the name of the queen over the seas, whereas at night Time was in Kowloon, resting over his brothers' fierceful bodies. And again, the pain of the woman's laughter. He took puff after puff. It was again morning, them together. They didn't care about Time.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
