Going up? What else could I have done? I didn't have anywhere else to go down. And I went up. You took me up to the stars. I thought it was the last floor. The supreme one. And I liked it. Then the buttons started to get broken. And I fell and I got up. And I fell and you got me up. And I fell and I followed you. I was dizzy, my heart was beating out of my chest, but I thought the journey was supposed to be like this. Until the cables broke. One by one. We played too much. I learned how to fly. See, I was right in the end, it's not good to play. Not with me.
(Translated by Andreea Denisa Dinu / 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. 
