I've always been afraid to be home alone. I would turn on the lights everywhere as if my fears were hiding at the windows and I was telling them that it was already full of people, there's no place for them. When Grandma died, I asked everyone to leave us alone. We stayed together under the pale light of a 1$ candle. I was hot, she was cold. I was scared, she was not. I was tensed, she was smiling. I took her hand and stood with my eyes closed. I understood then that darkness can be what you want. The electricity bills have dropped considerably.
(Translated by Andreea-Simona Trufin / 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 February 2021, the group has 4.300 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. 
