He was waiting for the mailman, dressed in a damp-smelling coat, his boots withered and his hands frozen. On his chest, he held the manuscript. It was warm and soothed his wounded heart. Every day, after midnight, he wrote with his eyes to heaven and earth. He called his thoughts home, scrutinized them, crunched his soul and sipped thirstily of agony and ecstasy. Now, he clothed himself in words and hid himself in yellowed sheets. He was setting out to preach his immortality. He hoped to stop the clock and get out in time.
(Translated by Adrian-George Ilinca / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected 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 February 2023, the group has 10,500 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. 
