You had been waiting for endless months for them to open the door of their world to you. I could hear your heartbeat, it was louder than the semantron on a holiday. I spied on your gaze as it climbed the walls. Moving to the beams, it drew labyrinths from which you could no longer get out, webs of thoughts that haunted your mind and soul. In vain did I recite to you the unwritten story of
self-love every night. I was a poor Scheherazade who with each sunrise was more and more exhausted. In vain would they welcome you with open arms. YOU are the prison.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / 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. 
