I've been chosen to feed the Minotaur. I hate you, mother, I hate you, father. Minos, I hate you as well, king, sick with the inability to decide what you want to be. Rest in peace there above me, for I am deep under the ground, inside the labyrinth. I throw the ball of thread away behind me, I throw away the Xanax and the dark depths of depression and I cry out from the hearts of those sacrificed: rise. And if you won't, you'll die. And the Minotaur stops in its tracks, trembles and settles into its present. Are you the creator? it asks. No, I'm exactly like you.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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 October 2021, the group has 7.275 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. 
