At 5 am I'm woken up from my childhood by the ring of the clock with metallic ears. I make coffee for my parents and commute to school. I'm the best in my high school, I do my homework in train stations, until daybreak. Consume both essays and pretzels on the hallways of the faculty, get knots in my stomach at my bachelor's degree exam. Maximum grade, a ten. Ten million cash, but the perspective of promotion is something else. Praises with kicks in the ass, extra money to buy cigarettes, performance bonus for the credit. I jump over stairs, meals, nights, years. On my resignation paper I write only
no time for it and smash my alarm clock.
(Translated by Mihaela Dumitrescu / 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. 
