The ashes of what used to be the village had fallen over the date palms and the olive trees. The coming of dawn was slowly thinning out the layer of mist that floated over the damp ground and the heads that were strewn about like melons in a farm. They were buried up their neck. Traitors. With a trembling hand, old Samson the Nazarite would lift up the chins of women and children, and to the men he would sprinkle salt on the eyes watered by the warm wind blowing from the south. The sun, getting smaller and blacker, stinged the air like spice.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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. 
