He was watching the whole city. The statue was a man with a hole in his chest and an outstretched palm holding his heart. Some said it was the sculptor himself, others a deluded young man. There was much talk. That night, with the sky blacker than hell, a bolt of lightning fell directly on it. In the morning, they all saw that he struck the outstretched hand and the heart fell. Ptiu, ptiu, they spit in their breasts. Only a little boy came closer. He put the heart in the hollow of his chest and caressed the statue on the spot he had hit. People's words? UFOs. Forgive them. The sky wept with shadows of flakes.
(Translated by Florina Șamata / 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. 
