He could not sleep at all. Suddenly, he got out of his bed and got closer to the wall. He knocked a few times, then asked quietly: Is someone out there? Is anyone hearing me? It must be someone else. He could not be the only one thrown away in isolation. It may have passed many months since they took him from home and locked him here. Tell me, dude, are you against the State, he repeated, hitting his forehead against the wall, while he was covering his ears with his hands. Who's this State, he was asking himself, faster than an echo, who would have wanted to shatter the silence of the world.
(Translated by Beatrice-Ioana Huruială / 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. 
