From the loudspeakers you could hear you are free, get out. Marc felt his body begin to shake and his heart skip a beat. He hoped his mother wouldn't force him out of the room where he had spent the last 15 years. The most he could do was take two steps out onto the balcony. He longed to feel the wind, but he wasn't ready to open the door yet. Don't come out, Mother. I don't want you catching a virus. We have everything here. But, Marc, it's a big world. We and the world don't belong together anymore. I hear people's breath in the streets and I'm scared. Very scared.
(Translated by Lenuța Bejenaru / 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. 
