Many stars in the sky. The writer's face is missing something, perhaps a monocle. Coffee with milk next to the wet tent. When he got the call, he put the feather down. To make a fool of himself and go to jail? 50,000 had been brought in with him, from the fields, the factories, the offices. What had the farmer from Kirovske, the carpenter from Irkutsk, or the IT guy from Rostov to do with this war? He took another sip of coffee, dropped his weapon in the mud and stepped into the night. Wait. Identify yourself. A Ukrainian sentry shot thirstily in the silent shadows. Many stars in the sky.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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. 
