How do you know when your own life doesn't fit you anymore? It squeezes you from one day to the next, desires multiply, hopes are too high, needs rise like yeast dough and anxiety has power. How to aspire to such greatness when you have such clearly defined boundaries? Anxiety screams. I take the whiskey bottle and the pencils, unleash the curls and go out on the beach. I let the waves undress me, I let the amber burn me and I let the pencils see me. Mommyyy. I clean myself up for breakfast. I reach for the door and bump into Phoenix.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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. 
