Fear is a behemoth that falls on your chest. It presses down on you so hard that in the stillness of the night you can almost hear your ribs creaking under its weight. It crushes your every cell. You stop. Although you would like to go back, you realize that the pieces of bread you left behind have been eaten by ravenous creatures. You can't take another step. You are petrified. You are searching within yourself for something, not even you know for what anymore, but it would be enough for it to be the size of a mustard seed and you'll be able to move mountains. That's what Someone had promised.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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. 
