Enlighten me, Duke with your scholarly thought: Dottore Balanzone, I have a ridiculous flaw, I keep forgetting an important dream from which everything emerges so clearly. The stars, being aligned, make the dream come back periodically, but randomly; the revelation strikes me, but a mask, just like the one you are wearing spreads over my face like a ghost over my revery and I lose it. I dream I am in a spa resort, and I quench my thirst from a mineral source that had absorbed me in its loins. When I wake up, I realize I have not fallen asleep. So, what was I saying?
(Translated by Raluca Simion / 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. 
