I have never seen him. But I knew he was there. Every disappointment, every bad day, every tear, the withdrawal, the sadness, the failure, all of that I thought was due to him. That was until the day I found out that he had never existed. I felt extremely miserable then. I realised that I was solely responsible for my failures. It hurt. But I finally felt like a human being, with all its weaknesses. I comforted myself, started to love myself and never sought perfection again. Since then I have embraced all my demons, because I know that they are the remains of the monster under the bed.
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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. 
