I have climbed up and down these damn stairsso many times that I have come to do it fluidly, with the tangential force applied by the pressure of Tomorrow. A poor puppeteer performing on demand. Sometimes I use strings, sometimes just my right hand, which has been blessed with seven fingers, compensating for the left, where I have but a lonely stump. But it helps. I use it to climb up to the attic located at the top of the stairs, when predators serve from my innocence. Today the dolls have rebelled. They've deserted, trying to get rid of me.
(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. 
