I was collecting screams. I started picking them up from work one day when I wanted to shout at everyone around me, I took the scream and hid it inside me. I used to talk to my mother on the phone 2-3 times a week, and I filled another shelf. I gathered so many that I didn't have room for them anymore: in the car driving, at shopping, from children in front of the apartment building. The hard part came at night when I made the inventory, until everything calmed down, sleep fled, frustration appeared, and the collection grew. Now I am collecting smiles, I run after them a lot, but I also sleep well.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
