When I was a young engineer, I designed and built a platform that could go vertically through the floors of the block of my life. I could go up and down, and on the steps I could see past and future stories, along with joys, sorrows, successes and fails, loved ones, love stories and my missing family. An engineering design error made me go beyond the last level and I reached the roof from where I can no longer climb, but only to look down on the stairwell, to the levels of my key memories.
(Translated by Delia-Maria Cocoș / 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. 
