In the first year, we were rebel kids, and the philosophy teacher's theory that we're all just photocopies made us laugh. Very calm, he told us to take out a sheet and write something original. I grabbed the pen with the confidence of age naivety. After a few attempts, I realised I didn't know what to write. So I decided to make the ultimate trick, which no one had the courage to think about: I would hand over the blank sheet just like that. How could I guess all my colleagues did the same thing.
(Translated by Denisa Dărăban / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
