She was in the bathroom, trying to use nail varnish to fix a run in her laddered tights, when she smelled smoke and heard gunfire. She cracked the door open and saw her comrades running towards the fire escape shouting like crazy that they had failed to retrieve something. Other comrades were running behind them cheering that something was being distributed. Then some men in black suits emerged, who were writing down who took something. The dawn found her on all foursinside the palace, concluding that nobody took anything. She looked at the ceiling that hadn't caved and at the shining floor. The tired comrade, Democracy, went back to the bathroom and fell asleep on the throne.
(Translated by Alin Sescu / 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. 
