One day I weighed myself and I got scared of my own weight. I decided that drastic times call for drastic measures. First, I relinquished my fear of darkness. It was useless anyhow. Next was my fear of free falling and with it my fear of heights. My fear of loneliness and of death were the heaviest. One by one I took off the fears my parents have dressed me in ever since I was a child. And many of them collected by myself. I feel a lot lighter, but I am now scared to know what will be left of me after I get rid of all the fears.
(Translated by Cristina Stan / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
