The place was dark and grim, perfect for her. No living being around, just rotting trees with their branches reaching skyward like empty prayers. No one would find me. She didn't know how she'd dug the hole, it was smaller than she'd wanted, but she'd squeeze in, hoping it wouldn't take long. She pulled at the earth with one hand, and it covered her in darkness and its weight began to press down on her. The air stank and she became afraid. She shouldn't have listened to them, she knew she had a special, unattainable beauty. Her last cry was lost in the ether.
(Translated by Andreea Grințescu / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
