The person, the SSN, that is not me. These are your conventions. I am a being of energy, transiently trapped in this old body. Hands wrinkled with jutting veins, calloused palms. These tremors are not mine. Neither are the aching joints. The whistling breath, the coughing and the shivering. Death has to have a reason. It's breathing down my neck, first in my sleep, then after I wake up. It smiles hideously with broken teeth and says to me: write faster, I'm starting to lose patience. The thermometer rises to 38,5. Do not publish this.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
