If you still want to retire to a castle, choose it well. It must have thick walls and latticed windows. And a deep moat all around. With muddy water, swarming with hippos and crocodiles. The drawbridge should come down only at your command. Rarely, very rarely, increasingly rarely. Don't worry about its creaking. You'll find it harmonizes well with that of your knees. It must have a dovecote. Are you asking why? Well, how else to send your messages to the twin castle in the parallel universe?
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
