Growing up in those times, I realized what I was meant to do early on. Being poor and honest man meant being a failure in everyone's eyes but Paler's. So I used him as my protection. A shield against my own fears, understanding what fear really is. Long afterwards I realized that destiny is only a mirror, your only opponent. Until you see yourself as you are, it will always hold you back. And that, sometimes, gets mistaken for life. My free will is my mentor, my creed and my guardian. I'm left with two words. No mercy.
(Translated by Cosmina-Florentina Ciobanu / 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. 
