I had the key to the sky. At night, I would sneak out of the house, get up the trembling ladder, into the attic, place down the chair, and, from on top of the house, I would open the door to the horizon. The blue would envelop me like in a fairytale, and I would discover the hidden body of the stars - that of a feline, of a bird, of a bug, filling up the surroundings like an amber teardrop. Now I'm tall, up to the sky, I even have to duck down under it to pass. I could open up the door with a wave of my hand, but only now did I start to look for the key.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. Daria Protopopescu / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
