My name is Paul and I am autistic. I would like to yell these words out, but I cannot articulate the words especially because I am autistic. What am I doing at school? I sit quietly at my desk. Words are to me akin to lots of needles that prick me. I try to communicate with my peers and teachers to no avail. I would like to play with the children, but I do not know how. Sometimes, I try looking at a child for several minutes, but he does not understand what my eyes are telling him. All I can do is bite my arm hard enough to draw blood.
(Translated by Marta Fulga / 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. 
