It is such a relief to know that monsters do not exist.My dad keeps telling me this every night. Just to make sure that I don't forget. I always tell him that I'm old enough and I'm no longer scared of such stories. He musses up my hairbefore bed. Good night, I say. Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs... and the lights went off. Darn it! I'll have to fight that monster on my own again. Not today. Maybe he also sleeps from time to time. I can hear his heavy breathing. And from under the bed I make up a rhyme. Darn, that stupid late-night rhyme which always comes on time. Come on, I'm a big boy now and dad doesn't get mad at me when I snuggle up next to him in 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. 
