The burden I carry breaks my atlas. What's hanging? Nights with teeth clenched by whiskey. The curled arms of brothels. The robberies. Epicurus said that freedom belongs to the man who is
self-sufficient. Stănescu spoke of
bird-men, with wings grown inside. You, mother, are my wing, from which I will flap. To resist here. I'm a kind of a prison librarian. Because I'm
well-behaved. I'm learning. I'm
self-taught. When I get out, I finish school and go back to my cage, to give wings to fallen angels.
(Translated by Lorina Xiaoyu Hou / 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. 
