The stairs lead wherever you think they do. You want and think that you are climbing them, or perhaps you want to think that you are. You were programmed to think that only the climbing symbolizes development, that you cannot climb down because there is no coming back. Little do you know that everything depends on the way the stairs were hatched at the time of your birth when the labyrinth was built, and at which entrance you were given the key. In Physics it is called relativity, in Optics it is called illusion, in the dictionary it might be the most suitable definition for life.
(Translated by Roberta Maria Gulerez / 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. 
