His soul was squirming inside of him as if he was out of sorts. It was searching for the tiniest crack through which it could break free. He had fed it with all sorts of things, to calm it down, temples, prayers, meditations. Nothing put an end to its turmoil. You're ridiculous, he said to it, trying to see and understand what had happened to it in its past lives. You're not what I'm looking for, a dry mumble which should've scared him followed, but instead it set him free. From then on, he lets the turmoil be. He stopped judging it. He forgave it.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
