At night, when the moonlight created strange patterns on her bedroom walls, she would see him. A dark motionless shadow on the ceiling, which would become terribly elongated, chasing away her dreams and making her heart miss a beat. The monster would watch her from up there and she would keep her eyes wide open every night for fear that she would fall asleep when she was vulnerable and exposed. Her monster was atypical. Her friends whispered to her that their monsters appeared from under their beds and she was ashamed to tell them that her personal beast defied any law by perching on the ceiling.
(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. 
