Mr. Georgel went to take the trash out although it was past midnight. When he was about to enter the door that leads to the garbage chute on that floor, he discovered that the doorframe was detached from the wall. He grabbed it a pulled a little. The doorframe started peeling off the wall like a poorly glued sticker. He continued peeling off the strip that was all around the entrance, until the reality he knew turned into a ball of colored foil. He remained hanging in the night on the dumpster's platform like an owl on the branch of a tree.
(Translated by Nina Iulia Tufă / 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. 
