Year 2049, 31.12. Mercury and six other planets were in retrograde. Total lunar eclipse. Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, all spiritual gurus, the Mercedeza witch, even Măruță, recently turned into a Scientologist, all of them were predicting it. On TV, online, in every corner of the world, this was the talk of the town. It was due at 00:00, there was going to be a final show in the sky: the moon was to explode like an enormous firework. Everyone had telescopes, all drugged out. 00:01 - what Apocalypse? Guess what? Iliescu was dead.
(Translated by Adelina-Maria Mănăilescu / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
