You are born, you see the light, you don't like it, you haven't got a taste for it yet, you fill up your lungs and scream, you find the breast and discover hunger. The second you've learnt what hunger is you've started dying but you have no idea, you keep on living like a fool, you eat and you burp satisfied, you learn things, or not, and no one tells the damn truth that I, Pat the Cat, leave written here on the wall of my cell. Everything it's backwards, you first die for 70 or 80 years or for how much you are given to die, and then, I think, you live. Thank God for my lack of faith.
(Translated by Ioana Busuioc / 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. 
