It was a gloomy day, I don't know if it was autumn or the colours of the world were just slowly fading. It was raining with huge raindrops, I could have curled up all in one, with the pain gathering in my organs, machine-gunned with fear. The cloud stubbornly hung above. Needles with blunt points piled up to penetrate my flesh. I shook off the regret and managed to get up, to push the cloud aside. From above, from the mirrored sky, stared the shadow of who I was. I shook off the cloud and ran to a strip of Sun light.
(Translated by Adrian-George Ilinca / 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. 
