Sometimes, my best friend is sadness. There is no feeling other than sadness that I feel a deeper intimacy with. I know three ways to live it, through empathy, loss or emptiness. When I reach the emptiness stage, I become both nothing and everything. Nothing, because I feel like my reality is dematerializing. Everything, because, at that moment, after absolutely all reasons, illusions and hopes fall, what remains can only be the truth. If I had 30 pieces of silver, I could buy a Messiah.
(Translated by Claudia Alexandra Văcărescu / 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. 
