Breathing in, breathing out. It is only 1 a.m. If I manage to fall asleep now and sleep deeply for 6 hours, I will be OK. I just need to calm my anxiety. It is not an earthquake, just my body shivering. But I will warm up and it will be OK. Breathing in, breathing out. It is 2 a.m. I still have 5 hours left to make me feel better. There is no black hole in my room, it is just the pitch-black night. I just have to turn on the night light and I will feel safe. Breathing in, breathing out. It is 3 a.m. and again, I feel like I am running out of time. Childhood monsters do not disappear, they transform. They rush from under the bed and get inside you. It is 4 a.m. Tick-tock.
(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. 
