I feel you closer and closer with every heartbeat of mine. I am terrified by your existence, the only certainty of mine. Yes, I know I wouldn't ask for seconds to last, if I had an eternity at my disposal. And still, I can't accept you. I can't look at you serenely. The happy cemetery is an absurd oxymoron and funeral homes with comic commercials are simply monstruous. I would fool you like Ivan Turbincă and then I would stick you in three leaden six-feet boxes you could never get out of. Ever.
(Translated by Ema-Teodora Rădulescu / 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. 
