They had all come out on the bridges of the transatlantic liner on the seventh day in the morning, watching and waiting for the new shore to appear. It was still dark and foggy. On the upper deck, under the furs, they dreamed of being courteous gentlemen, the twinkling lights came through the fog and they heard the foxtrot. Downstairs, the bad-tempered bunch of weak bodies and dozens of tangled tongues cut the fog with their eyes wide open and waited for a small light to shine, a sign of luck. Under the riveted bridges black coal people gathered from the steam.
(Translated by Andreea Theodora Drăgan / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
