Nobody could sleep anymore. The sun hadextinguished and they had found an artificial surrogate for it, but sleep was still necessary, so if it were to find a positive aspect of it, it's that insomnia had been abolished. At the set hour, lying in bed you were administrating yourself a shot; not of alcohol, an injection, tsss, you were instantly falling asleep and you were waking up the next second. Eight hours had passed. Sometimes six, when it was failing; anyway it seemed just a second for you. They would steal your dreams. If you were lucky, you would remember them by day, when you were staring at a wall.
(Translated by Ema-Teodora Rădulescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
