Five stones sit quietly on the edge of the alley. A kid hits them with a bomb, downhill. One wanders through the brambles. Four end up in the field. A wagon runs over them and crushes one. Three stones are left, sitting quietly in the field where a little girl is picking flowers I wouldn't forget. She takes a stone and stuffs it in her trawl. She'll crack peanuts. The others she throws into the river. Two stones sit quietly on the riverbank. One slips in the cold rush and goes downhill. One stone remains, waiting for a goat to crack it. An unnatural day.
(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. 
