He lived through 40 springs and had hundreds of hunted corpses, testimony to his supremacy. His crooked beak and his long, flaccid nails foreshadowed his end. He knew he had a decision to make. And he did. He retreated to the top of the mountain, nesting in suffering. The beak pounded loudly on the rock carrying the echo down the valley, foretelling the triumph to come. After five months of hunger and agonizing pain, he spread his wings for his new life as a predator. His flight to eternity was suddenly cut short. The cold bullet passed through new feathers. The heart reddened the sky.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
