Each blow knocked me down even more. My soul would then slink away and lie on the couch in the imaginary room, while my body moved mechanically in the world outside. It would come out a little more slowly to start again. Today I got another blow. The last one. I'm wandering in the dark, in the thin wind outside. A bench. I sit down. Cold rain drizzles down my face. But I don't care anymore. My soul is already on the couch. The fire crackles in the stove. It envelops me. It caresses me. I'm fine. I don't go back to my frozen body.
(Translated by Oana Irina Oprea / 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. 
