I lie in bed, the mattress swallows me in soft tentacles, I close my eyes, I relax to the depths of my iris and I go into mindfulness mode. I don't know since when have I felt this thrill: tingling in my chest, then below, on my thigh, on my thigh, on my thigh, it reaches the sole, oh, in the sole, it climbs again on the back, it anchors in the shoulder blades, and it finally rests on one finger, I wouldn't have thought, could it be on a finger? I immediately reached for the bottle of alcohol, a relentless truth is crushing me: the cat gave me fleas.
(Translated by Alexandra Gruia / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 September 2021, the group has 7.150 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. 
