I sit with a nausea in my groin. I don't know how or why my soul has been clogged? I only know that greatness will take me to the edge of survival. What am I looking out for? Like a sentinel of helplessness I vigilantly watch over for lexical grain thieves. Every night they watch me fall asleep and burrow into the bowels of my words, dissecting them like unskilled surgeons, hacking away at my meanings, giving them the dry rot of their corncob-pen polished by the exercise of pastiche. But what can I do? Feed them venom.
(Translated by Lenuța Bejenaru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
