Door by door, I looked upon my mistakes and their consequences. I didn't realise how much pain I had caused through my selfishness and lack of awareness. If only there was nothing else after death, if only I would cease to exist just like that, I thought. When I reached the last door, I was ready for another mistake, perhaps the most repugnant of them all. Instead, I saw her. Her, as my daughter, so different from me and yet still mine. Myself, as a father, in her happy memories. An evil soul raised a good soul. After 100 mistakes, room 101 steered me towards the light.
(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. 
