Lately, you have been falling asleep later and have been waking up earlier. You are smiling in your sleep sometimes, like an infant. Then, during the day, you forget where you left your slippers and your glasses and you are looking for them in every inch of your house, feeling every inch of the coldness as well. You leave the lights open in your house; I think you have developed a fear of darkness. You heat the oven even on hot days as if you were cold all the time. You feel pain in your whole body, I hear you groaning sometimes. What do you mean how would I know? Didn't you install four cameras below my left ribs so I can see you all the time?
(Translated by Roberta Ana-Maria Gulerez / 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. 
