I'm trying hard to hold onto principles, but life tries me even harder. It's easy to claim you love truth, uphold good and beauty until you are in the posture of choosing - you respect the law and your child gets to prison still if you became a judge? You take of your boots and give them to the poor soul with frostbite? How many of us are saints when it comes to taking action? Isn't it a little hard to practice what you preach? We're not there yet, and there is a long way ahead of us. It would be nice to find that harmony within me.
(Translated by Elena-Diana Cocîr / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
