When Stalin was being laid to rest, the locals brought out their most precious liquors, previously hidden in the darkness of their cellars. They drank bottoms up, forgetting to breathe, so they all got stiff necks, looking up to the sky. A sea of wide open eyes waited all night for the shooting star that could grant their aching wish. The defiant clouds hid the sky. In the morning, upon going back to work, they realized that they had got drunk on cold water. A coffin is not enough to bury an ideology.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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. 
