steam was getting out and he suddenly felt thirsty. The water in the bowl had dried up a long time ago and the mug was disgracefully placed on the table, without the stem. He didn't remember how he broke it. Then he got terribly hungry and wanted to tear off a pita shell, but it looked dry and moldy. Why were they all old when he was away for only one second? He felt like biting the apple that somehow was fresh and unspoiled on the corner of the table, but his hands fell and he had nothing to grab it with. He smiled bitterly. I'm dead and you're still trying to tempt me, devil?
(Translated by Andreea Denisa Dinu / 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. 
