My lucky number is 8. My mother combed my hair for 8 minutes straight every night, even on the night she died with the comb in her hand.
I make sure the stove is off 8 times before leaving home. I turn on and off any switch 8 times. I open and close my car's door before I get in the seat 8 times. I knock on every door8 times. I loop every roundabout 8 times. I put 8 alarms on my phone. I take 8 showers per day. It only took the doctor 8 minutes to diagnose me with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
(Translated by Jin Cristian Yang / 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. 
