I was advised to get a pet and bought a journal. At least this one doesn't bark, meow, bite, scratch, you don't trip over it in the apartment and you can lock it in a drawer. Only it always hungers. For words. He chops them up, chews them up and can't get enough. I'm afraid he'll get overweight, so I put him on a diet. Small portions, day and page. Now we're face to face. Me in attack position with pen in hand, him defiantly flaunting his pristine 200-something page.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Marinescu / 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. 
