Everyone was hurrying to get out. And he was standing in their way, opening his arms wide, closing his eyes as if saying an incantation, and hoping: to be crushed by a lot of hugs or at least one, to be lifted in the air like a rockstar or at least to be looked at, to be absorb in his pores the heat of other's hands or at least the cold. Nobody touched him. But he continued. In the city they despised his paralyzed game, they laughed at the Phantom Madman. He was one of the last Dreamers. He was waiting for a skin like his, in which to surrender.
(Translated by Ana Spînu / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
