I had recently movedand the house had an old-fashioned canopy bed.I wasn't going to keep it, but it reminded me of something familiar. The bed coughed from the first night.It was an old bed cough, one that's been through a lot. Over the next few nights, the coughing got worse, turning the house into a steam room.It shook me, but I wasn't scared, in fact it gave me a sense of safety. After a week or so it started talking to me. He knew the most beautiful bedtime stories. He'd once been a tree that was too often hugged.
(Translated by Raluca Ioana Crucerescu / 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. 
