The hours are passing differently now, much slower, the universe wants to give me back the time lost in studying, the distance between the tick and the tack has expanded, the cuckoo comes out much less often from the cage full of gears, I did not feel these 72 years passing by, and now it hits me every second. I got myself a cat to keep me company, I don't know what he's doing with nine lives, even one seems like a lot to me. I climb onto chair, put on my tie, and copy the movements of the pendulum as the front door opens.
(Translated by Carol Popa Zafiriadi / 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 March 2022, the group has 8,050 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. 
