Tick, tock. Tick. Every word I utter sends my sinusoidal twitching too high, too low. Effort. Every step I take is in rhythm of tick, tick. You have me watch my watch. And I chart my time, cutting my son's face diagonally from the picture. Tick, tick, tick now I cry and I can't afford to overdo it, tick. You know I'm a collector of situations, high voltage, but I don't like continuous lines. Come on help me up, give me the crutches leaning on my aorta, I feel like laughing, charge your battery, tick, tick, tick.
(Translated by Cristina-Nicoleta Costache (Mircea) / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
