I feel a volcano of words start to rise from my stomach. Up into the roof of my mouth, a few clouds of fresh saliva penetrate. But it's me they dare mess with, the damn words, I immediately smack them with my tongue, crush them there, grit my teeth, sometimes a letter slips out of my mouth, a slight carelessness. Squashed immediately with the tip of my shoe. In my mouth it's pitch dark, the bright white of my teeth is insufficient, the words, some without all the letters on them, get bored quickly. Like me, in fact.
(Translated by Andreea Grinţescu / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
