I am in front of his door. I bite my lips, I take two steps back, I arrange my hair, I pinch my cheeks, I take a few deep breaths. My heart guides me again to the door, but my brain moves me away from it, slowly. My heart grabs me by hand, the mind slaps me. I pull out quickly from the bag a piece of mind, four screws and a screwdriver. I assemble it in my skull, like a little table from Ikea. My heart does not give in, it continues to fight. When I look for the last time at his door, all the screws from my head drop. I enter without knocking. I got the floor wrong.
(Translated by Beatrice-Ioana Huruială / 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. 
