Wake up. Get up slowly. Breathe. Go to work. Work for twelve hours. Sweat. Pay the mortgage, rent, bills, taxes. Start a family, build a house, have a yard and children. Get a car, a phone, a TV, a stove, a fridge in instalments. You live your life in instalments. Money talks, it's never enough. You aspire for more in life, you wish you had more, everybody does. Not only do you push yourself but you also feel like everybody is pushing you. You lie down tired. You suddenly fall sleep. You start dreaming what it would be like to fall in a deep sleep. You sleep forever.
(Translated by Alin Sescu / 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. 
