At the heart of the altar in the fragile traveling temple that carries me through the cosmos, I am my adored god, my feared demon, my almighty master, and my humble servant. Every day, before sunrise, I take out my heart, I bring it as an offering, I marvel at the gift, then I have only one commandment to give myself: love yourself, when you lose your way and you are afraid that you will never know to get home when you're wrong, because you wanted to do differently than you were told, and especially when you know for sure that you're the least lovable.
(Translated by Laura-Elena Dobrin / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
