I know you're spying on me, you scaredy-cats. I can't take one step without feeling your microlenses in the back of my head. Not to mention the microphones. I give one fart and minutes later, I hear it reverberated and amplified on Instagram. Now I shower with my clothes on. Otherwise, I'd find out I got a boob job from the news. I've had it, you vultures. You think I'm paranoid? No, I'm not. I had a bacon omelet for breakfast. 5 minutes later, I got an anonymous message: cholesterol is bad for your health.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / 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.