The creak of the last step gives me cold shivers. The door opens, a stench of muddy decay floods the room and thousands of tentacles swarm the place. From under the bed, I close my eyes and pray it shows. I rewind the memory to the day Grandma showed me the chest, blow the outline of the key into my palms and send it into my thoughts. Get lost, I shout as the key unlocks the chest. Tentacles slink inside, push the lid and twist the key. I grab the memory by the ends and tie it in a knot. Dawn finds me with a knotted handkerchief in my fist.
(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. 
