What are you doing here? Voluntary patients at the mental hospital, digression towards seduction, the Athens in the marketplace, slums of desires. Why are you lying? I'm stuck in the vise between yes and no, dream and reality, guilt and innocence. What do you want, really? I don't want to miss a single page of Rodica and Costeluș' and I'm looking for the perfect epitaph. Aren't you afraid? No, 'cuz no director is going to make a communist out of Balboa. Man, just tell the truth. I admit, then: I'm afraid of the deserts of broken love and of blank pages.
(Translated by Ana Stănilă / 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. 
