I don't even have new friends, let alone old ones. I've had colleagues, neighbours, partners, pals, but none of that survived long enough for me to be able to call them friends. Evidently I am to blame here. I'm a difficult person, I only listen to my inner voice. Seems like it's buried deep enough that nobody's deigned to hear it. And so I find myself at the age of Christ, wandering barefoot through the desert, tempted by the serpent of society and befriending the self in the mirror. Does the antiquity of minutes count?
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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. 
