Remember the chain on the door? You people born after the Revolution sure don't. I used to be fascinated by chain doors, because I could see a little bit of the entrance hallway, see how it was painted. More than that, I could smell the house. At my mother's house it smelled of Titan, at my grandmother's house it smelled of food, at Mrs. Constantinescu's house it smelled of tea plants. I liked it most when I went on visits and encountered unfamiliar,
chain-linked doors. I had to imagine who lived behind them, just from the aroma and the colour.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Marinescu / 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 January 2022, the group has 7.830 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. 
