There are days when you buckle under pressure and think that if a hole in the ground were to suddenly open up, you could throw yourself into it. I envisioned this dark, murky hole a million times. I pictured myself there, crouched, begging for mercy, crying out all the pains. I cried and screamed until I realized that my pain was no longer just mine. All the grief of mankind rests on my shoulders and is pushing me even more into the hole so that I will have to die right there, in an unknown place, wrapped in this universal misery. I feel the way He scolds me. You get up.
(Translated by Iuliana Boruga Danciu / 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. 
