Earth, Earthquakes, disasters, floods. People have lost their minds. They kill each other for a piece of bread. A rat bites the flesh from a bleeding corpse. A hyena tears up a corpse, a wolf howls in the distance. Children disappear out of nowhere in a black pit. A mother defends her baby from a blood-thirsty hawk, an old woman reads from the Bible, a teenager cuts her veins, a woman throws herself into the void. The end is coming. And all went dark. I drop the popcorn in my lap. I feel a warm hand and a passionate kiss. Romantic horror.
(Translated by Andreea Laura Stanca / 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. 
