I'm writing to you just to let you know. For you to know and be afraid. Just yesterday here stood a town; it's all in ruins now. The rains came and overflowed the lake. In the middle of it rose a lofty tree. The tree was everything that was left of the town. When the lake dried out, the tree did too. Only then did I notice it was hollow. It had been someone's abode that kept it alive. How do I know all of these? It happened all of a sudden, before night got a chance to turn into day. Many had gone mad. Those ditches carved into faces are not what you see them to be; this is what they want us to believe. Ever since they trapped us under the dome.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
