Climb the stairs slowly, kid, said my grandmother, the ladder is rickety, but you're as thin as a rake, it won't break. Stand in the door like a master, from now on it's your home. Are you upstairs, in the dark? Now stop at the big beam. Do you hear it? It's thefurniture beetleof the house, listen carefully. It's been living in the wood even before the house existed and before your grandpa and I had ourwedding, he's known us both dead and alive. If you listen, you'll understand. If you understand, wake up from your dream, come out into the light and live like the world ain't a hollow and life ain't the woodchips in it.
(Translated by Andreea Ciubuc / 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. 
