The ghosts of the past still haunt me. From time to time I glance over my shoulder and I feel a starein the back of my head. Nobody. On other days it seems to me that they sneak around the walls and reach out their hands towards me as if to touch me. It's only a shiver, maybe it's just the wind. Yesterday it started raining out of the blue and I went into the first shop I saw to buy an umbrella. When I went outside, the rain had stopped, but I opened the umbrella and started running through fresh puddles. Now I was the one chasing my childhood shadows.
(Translated by Andreea Ciubuc / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
