The room was bathed in white light, which the late autumn morning made even bleaker. The teachers, lined up as if for an exam, were taking turns asking questions, their low and solemn voices tinged with emotion. The student answered them gesturally, at long intervals. For everyone, graduating high school meant a new beginning. For him, it was a grand wish fulfilled and promptly acknowledged by the heart monitor, which, attentive to the teachers' final words, started to uniformly screech while showing a steady, horizontal line.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
