He opened his eyes at 3 o'clock on a Tuesday around 1900. He screamed as long as his lungs held, he was fed, he began to drink through the tenth grade, the first cigarette he smoked behind the block, he left for the army, the Revolution came, he shot, he was scared for his mother, his father died at the University, he didn't get to the funeral, he graduated from college, he went beyond, for years he ate tasteless tomatoes, he returned. That's about it, he told me, then, behind his eyelids, a thick fog struck his unseen.
(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. 
