The rain was pouring down on Damascus like never before. The world's oldest capital needed sunshine to illuminate its independence. Near the summer theatre, amid the ruins, a mother and two children were trying to dig a hole to bury their dog, a few metres away a stray dog was burying its bone and next to it 6 refugees from Homs were trying to light candles for the dead. The Great Mosque now only housed bodies trapped under stone. When they looked up, they saw the Baptizer. You have won.
(Translated by Lenuța Bejenaru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
