From every window came a stench of mute sorrow. The once cheerful and noisy lanes had been now empty since the new Minister for Facial Recognition had introduced the recommendation under the auspices of compulsion. No one was allowed to communicate except telepathically. And as I am talkative, a repository of words and suffering from an intense need to talk, I was the first to be exiled. There were others, incontinent talkers, but they'd fled to the catacombs. But from the muddy scriptural deafness, I will rise and on the walls of the world I will write.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
