The city had a dead soul. Twenty daughters were lying on the unsanitary steps of the station, their bodies so pale, like frozen ghosts that went up your spine. Twenty mummies with scars in every breath, exhausted, squeezed/draw out of every tear, and pulled like a collar into one body suffocated by this strange fate. Twenty signs of angels to forgive, to share the suffering. Twenty hours until the blood of the abomination painted the same steps eaten away by the dirt from the shoes. But still a sweeter mess.
(Translated by Diana Stănescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
