Trapped in a body that doesn't listen to me anymore. Trapped in a life that doesn't belong to me. I am internally screaming and I keep asking myself with no answer. I cannot get the paraplegics who resign themselves to this situation and they move on. I wish I could do that, too. I hate those who say that it is not hard. Be grateful that you are alive, they say. Does nobody else notice that I stopped living? All days are the same for me. There no sun, there is no love. Everything is an awful memory now. Can someone hear me, please? Get me out of here.
(Translated by Ioana Oacheşu / 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 March 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.
