The old circus performer woke up with the traces of a forgotten dream on his lips. It was almost morning, and the room was floating in the shadows. On a wall, memories of a lifetime laid hanging, Paris, Moscow, Berlin. He had seen all the cities of the world and lived all that was to be lived. I have to get to the bathroom, he thought, trying to stand up. The pain confirmed to him that the life on the walls no longer existed, and now the applauses of the past were just rolling him from one day to another. This is also an adventure, he thought, reassuring himself.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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 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. 
