He was aware that it must be solved once and for all. He had to confront the man from the other side. Though he was afraid he did not understand and no matter how hard he struggled, he would have been lost through the threads which kept the other one hung and would not have fumbled the ones that would have brought him to the core. He split the door and then opened it completely. He stared at him for a long time. He knew him, yet he barely knew him. He checked out his tight lips, his lifted forehead, and his deepened eyes. He did not have the courage. He closed the door of the wardrobe and fell into the armchair.
(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. 
