I remember only this: I was five years old,
short-haired like a little boy. No one liked me in kindergarten. I had no friends and I always played by myself. I could say I've known solitude from a young age. When I grew up, a brilliant idea came to my mind: every evening I sneaked into my parents' room and I pretended to fall asleep, and each time my father came and gently take me into his arms and brought me to my room. It was the only way I could get a hug. It was all I wanted.
(Translated by Alexandra Handrea / 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. 
