How do you take the pain out? From where? From which draining pipe? This is what I want to know. What do you do when that broken piece inside you hurts so badly that you wish to tear away many others with your own hand. When you roll over the ground for nothing, hitting the floor with your fists, knees and head, when not even blood, piercing nails into flesh or the gasping scream couldn't help. When you are suffocating no matter how much air you swallow like a fish would swallow drops of water. What do you do then? Come, come into my arms.
(Translated by Camelia Băluţă / 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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
