there are tears. The bogeyman is ever-present. Not even him believes something like that. A father holds his daughter's hand tightly, she is trapped under the ceiling. He knows it's cold, but he can't leave. Across, a dog found its owner and barks at him to not be afraid. Two young people are still embracing each other when dug out. It was their honeymoon. Silence. A whole family. Lifeless. From a mother, an umbilical cord. At the end of it, a baby. It's alive. And its cries are shaking everyone's souls. A thread of water, coming from nowhere, springing to nowhere. At the end of the rainbow, the Earth is weeping.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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. 
