Volunteers for guard duty, I hear through the window so I shut it. She's sick, the child's sick, who answers messages, you are ok, the hand with tickets sneaks through the door but I push it back outside, I close it, I lock it. Fists bang against the walls, muffled voices resonate, he died, she died, a suicide, I tried to set myself on fire. I curl myself up, palms covering my ears, my lids tighten and I remember how huge my room is, a large cathedral with hot pulsating walls. In the middle, in a rhythmic waltz, my heart beats a deafening chime.
(Translated by Jin Cristian Yang / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
