She'd been walking for some time. The water was nearly finished, she didn't know how long it'd been since her last meal. The sun was burning her. She'd covered her head with a strip of cloth. She knew it wasn't long till there. She'd been here when they'd come to sell carpets. The road took roughly three days. She had to get there by nightfall. The sun started dipping below the horizon. She was saved, she could see the castle wall ahead. Already the wall's shadow crept over the ground. Something wasn't right, there was no one guarding the gate, they had all left even from here.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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. 
