The burning sun scorched everything and he could have sworn that if he had looked through a crack in the earth, he would have seen all the way to hell. He was lying on his belly, watching a dragonfly quenching its thirst in a trickle of water. With a swift movement, he caught it. He grinned. He stuck the needle between its wings and the blue flutter did him good. He placed the dragonfly between two butterflies, grabbed the insectary and crawled to the wheelchair. Fucking heat, he gasped, once he reached the top. With the wheel he crushed a little fly that was about to take flight. Fucking dream.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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. 
