I thought of Vali the whole way. I imagined him sleeping at the root of a beech tree or cornered by beasts in the woods. I wanted to go back ten times, but each time I changed my mind. The next day, he came to get his chainsaw out of the car. What have you done to me, sir Paul? Luckily, a buddy from Brădet who was in a wagon caught up to me. And did he bring you home? He brought me, my ass. He had a few cans of Bucegi. We drank ourselves to sleep. When we woke up, the wagon was in the middle of the Vâlsan river. Well, Vali, the horses must have gotten thirsty too.
(Translated by Raluca Ioana Crucerescu / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
