A dog barks hoarsely, as if he had had too much of it the past few nights. There's a smell of freshly cut grass in the air. The owlets mind their own business and, in passing, scare a few faint-hearted people. Gheorghe wakes up in the middle of the cemetery that he has always seen from the balcony. He sits up, stretches, and says to himself, satisfied, that he slept really well. His back doesn't even hurt anymore - that's what a good sleep means. From the door of the von Voning family crypt, two transparent shadows watch him. One asks the other: Are you going to tell him he's dead?
(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. 
