He was carrying a double string, wearing more keys than it could handle; every time he would haunt the halls of the castle, the key keeper lost some of them, but the number of the keys did not decrease. There appeared new doors asking to be opened, and he always found the right one sooner or later. He found a door in front of which someone was standing, unable to enter because it did not have a lock; so he told them it was the door of the soul; it was not locked, but it could only be opened from the inside, because the key was bigger than the door.
(Translated by Roberta Ana-Maria Gulerez / 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 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. 
