The chirping of a bird eases my sleep. The honk of a truck drives it away. I jump out of my bed like struck by lightning. I am running late. I take a quick shower, get dressed on-the-fly and brush my hair with my fingers, I jump in the car, but find squashed bird droppings on the windshield and the front tire deflated. I run dizzy to the train station, reach the platform and the train whistles at me as it departs. Tiredly, I sit down on a bench. A man takes the spot next to me. I also missed it, he says, smiling. Now we are sitting glued next to each other. We no longer want to get on any more trains.
(Translated by Tania Diniță / 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. 
