An empty elevator, stuck with its doors open on the ground floor. There's no one here, I thought, since it's left like that. I stepped and I stayed. The I took out my brushes. I painted a fire, a swing, an old table under trees, memories. Then I started dreaming that there can be dreams in a stuck elevator and in dreams everything is possible. Sometimes I was feeling it move even after waking up. After a year there were birds flying above me, under an unreal shade of blue. After two, a voice shouted: it won't work, it's too loaded. I got down and left.
(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. 
