The camera is spinning with me. The walls fall towards each other and I can no longer feel myself. I want to wake up, but I can't open my eyes. My body is stiff. What if I'm not here anymore? My parents will find me in the studio flat they bought with money they saved with the little they had. They'll find me among the books and they won't understand a thing. What did I do that for? I never gave them a sign. I went to church on Sunday. I was the perfect child. The child where the world died at birth, hidden under a smile. The privileged one. The alienated one.
(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. 
