The town where she had grown up was always covered in a layer of fog pierced by a diffuse light. She was frightened the first time she saw the sun, not by its brightness, but by the shadows left by people. Then she realised that shadows are born from light and she was no longer afraid of them. Well, she was still afraid, but not to step on them, lest she hurt people. She saw how they appeared and disappeared with the sun, and it terrified her that they might one day disappear altogether. Eventually, she understood that man was not his own shadow. Only then was she well.
(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. 
