I was walking quietly down the road the other day and I stepped in a pothole and sprained my foot. I went to the hospital and waited quietly for ten hours. I went home with a prescription and a sound scolding for going to the ER for every trifle. I got home exhausted and as I lay down to sleep, the neighbour started drilling holes. They'd recently moved in. I got out, clad in my pyjamas, and tried to calmly explain that I needed to sleep. Now I'm in this white room with thin walls. Apparently, I've been too agitated. Since when did the dictatorship of common sense disappear?
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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 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. 
