Some people call it drug. You take it with water or brandy and then your imagination runs wild, it transforms you into a prince or a frog, into a princess or a witch. You become addicted, a slave to the story in the glass. It completes you, caresses and hurts you, it throws you into a world of beauty and ugliness to which you would not have access otherwise. If you don't have it by your side, day by day, you ache for it. I don't call it a drug. Its name is
Real Fictions. And I don't drink it with water or brandy, I savor it melted into crafty words that lead me in heaven or hell.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Marinescu / 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. 
