The gatekeeper greets me coldly. He's waiting for retirement. What could I say? I just got hired here. Today, I'm going to talk alone again. I'm lying to myself every morning that their silence doesn't leave scars. So many names that I'll forget at one point: Flavius, Bogdan, Miruna, Denisa. So many beautiful souls and no dream, prematurely jaded destinies, all of them suffering from
end-stage indifference. I wish they would open their eyes, and each one of them would live. But they want to be dead in a high school. Bacovia, you are my students' idol.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
