When I saw the dead dog, I got out of the abandoned house as fast as I could. It was nighttime, lightning was flashing, and looking back I felt like something lurking was running towards me. The blizzard was pushing me from ahead, I was trying to avoid all the hands sticking out of the ground holding empty glasses as if they were begging. A single old hand grabbed my leg and wouldn't let go. Then all the other hands reached out for me as if they saw that I had fallen and couldn't get up. And what did you do next? I woke up.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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. 
