It has banisters, vertical bars, a small distance between them, as not to fit the head of some naughty child. I stretch and reach the banister with one hand, and the wall with the other. And then there are three square landings; there's an equal space between the steps. It's illuminated from the top as well as from the bottom, there are windows, light bulbs, light switches. It's lacquered, but not slippy and we will all wear slippers or
non-skid socks anyway. I look at it and realize how afraid I am to climb it up and down, to fall, to begin, to continue, to arrive, to find, to finish.
(Translated by Dragoş Frangulea / 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 June 2021, the group has 6.650 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. 
