November 15th, '87. Cold. Brașov. Workers on the streets. They gave us orders to triple the guard posts at night. To prevent them from jumping the unit's fence to steal weapons. I - back then a young booger of a conscript in the army, 18 and a half years old - was just learning to shave. I hadn't even attended my first shooting training. How were we supposed to stop them? Using bayonets? I, who had never even butchered a chicken? Those people, had they come,they would have had crowbars and clubs. Lord, was I frightened that night. I stood there, by the fence, for 3 hours. Shivering. From the cold, from fear, from the night.
(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. 
