In the dusk, they watched with fascination the ascending movements of a dragonfly, vibrant transparencies in satin eyes. The forest shivered, two men grinned nastily, and one pulled out his pocket knife. Run, said the boy. The blue dress was barely distinguishable, it collapsed. They found him lying there, breathing heavily, pieces of crushed kiwi, blood. I'm in the forest, said the boy. The dragonfly rested on his wounded lips, the face gently grasped it, and whispered something. The thunderbolts raged, near them was a tree touched by reddish lightning, the forest was burning in a whirlwind.
(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
