I was crying in a gray world, we were like in an orchestra, each one of us paying attention to their own crying. But now, in the surrounding wilderness, my crying is shrill. I ran away from the abdomen tagma when they figured it out that I was cephalothorax. They disappeared in time and I am wandering alone through everything that they destroyed. I'm stepping attentively on leftovers of consumption, on lava, on rotten ozone. I haven't seen a star or a ray of sunshine for a long time, and no smell of chlorophyll. There is a tear under my boot, I bend down, a page from a book that was protecting a grass seed. Life's laughing, I'm laughing too.
(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. 
