He turned off the TV, the darkness seemed sinister. First the pandemic, then the war, and now these blues. They all got into that little piece of gate and grinned from there, like in a group shot. There's about 70 of them. Nobody saw how the bat landed just at the end, just as the 11m was being beaten, nor how thousands of blue creatures appeared in the stands. The TVs don't know what to make up anymore, to keep the man with his eyes glued to them, he told himself and went to bed. The next day when he woke up he was, from head to toe, blue.
(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / 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. 
