I open the eyes in the night, startling. My heart is beating fast, a bird is struggling in my chest. It's not the first time, I turn on the light, pick up the phone and absentminded I start to delete with the finger hundreds of images from social media, how well X cooked, how beautiful are the Y's children, what flowers Z has in the garden, their perfect lives help me to escape mine. I don't have children, nor flowers, I don't even have a cat. I throw little hearts on the internet and I nurse mine once more with the strangers that take the place of my family.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / 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 July 2022, the group has 8,750 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. 
