The circus, the circus is coming, the children cried. As soon as they heard this, the women started quivering. They knew that by the end of the fair, one of the boys would disappear. They were already starting to light candles and pray it wasn't theirs. There was such a grin on the men's faces as if they'd experienced what the average man couldn't possibly understand. They came out of nowhere. The old men said they'd seen them when they were young and they looked the same. Who knew? Maria, the old crone, swore she'd read in the tarot deck that they were spirits rather than people.
(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. 
