Lately I'm pretending to be stupid quite often. After years of being smart pulled me down, I decided that a change was needed. I was tired and tormented. At night I was thinking about how to solve things, how to behave exemplary, how to please those around me, how to share my attention, feelings, resources. I wanted everything to go well, just as I intended. I have been exaggerating to the point of craziness to achieve my goals. I was walking up to the bitter end. I am not doing that anymore, not today, not ever. I finally understood that there is nothing wrong in living life freely, as luck may have it.
(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. 
