When he's just about to start the graveyard shift, he looks up at the stars, locking his eyes on them, and realizes that he has yet to get used to the shiver running deep into his bones. He thinks to himself: Dear Lord, please let me see the sunrise once again; and then he whispers: Let it be anything but methane. A handful of brave individuals wait in the briefing room, all of them motivated to make their loved ones' lives easier. The shadows linger on the surface. The only thing going underground is the song carried on their dusty lips. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, back on the ground we'll go.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / 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. 
