My parents used to me draw everywhere. The walls were full of princesses, flowers, stars, castles. Then, after dad left, the walls got smaller and smaller, the colors less and less. One day, while I was eating alone at the kitchen table, penguins appeared on the fridge door. The next day, daisies. The third day, dolphins. I started eating more and more often, and enjoying more and more drawings. Now, I don't know why, I'm in the hospital. A nurse just gave me a pill. I stare at the white walls. I can't see anything anymore.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / 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. 
