She lived like a flame, burning bright and vivid, filling the world with color, giving herself with blazing sparks, her heat scorching entire souls. Looking at the blaze, God put his head in his hands, covering his eyes. Her body eventually turned into ashes, like she wanted, and they were scattered to the four winds and mixed into the soil until there was nothing left. Only in a corner of the world where there's no wind, a man hides her image inside, like an icon beneath a lit candle.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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. 
