Behind me, strips of the person I lived, climbing to a spider's web of the soul: loves, disappointments, struggles, beautiful. Ahead, strips of myself I haven't lived yet, packed in fragile boxes with multicolored bows, which I will open or not. Here, I. Introspective, looking at my reflection shattered by existential questions. One shard dilates my smile in beams of light, another drips my tears on the escalating edges of fear. Never defeated. Clear. Crossing bridges, from me to me.
(Translated by Ana Spînu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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. 
