Fifth night since the invasion. The opaque city, fires burn in the distance. I found shelter upstairs, in the attic of the town hall. Downstairs, from Decathlon, I bought sleeping bags, flashlights, and thick clothes. At sunrise I run home. Five hundred steps. It's the time they go back. I put the pot on the stove and I'm glad they haven't turned off the gas yet. I make spaghetti with tuna. I pack clothes and all the medicine I can find; the pharmacy in the mall was robbed. I want to cry. I can't take the books with me.
(Translated by Alin-Marian Mărgescu / 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. 
