Underneath the road, there are stones. Beneath the stones, millions of tiny, tiny, and not-so-tiny creatures crawl in giant loops. They come and go for seemingly no reason, building mazes of moisture, micro-organisms, and debris. Death is alive, it gives birth to something else, which is food for something else, which is food for something else. On the road, thousands of non-living cars drive by. If you flipped the road like a pancake, millions of tiny, tiny, tiny, and not-so-tiny living things would circulate on the road. And for whom death is alive.
(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. 
