Nobody was in the denial phase; they had enough of not being someone, or at least someone else, a surrogate. They had never felt so useless before, not mattering to any person or creature. So, without any hesitation, they decided not to engage with anything negative, ever. Zero, null, nada. They never wanted any worthlessness in their life again. They reached into their pocket so deeply that they went all the way in, and pulled it out from nowhere; they found so much happiness within themselves, as only nowhere had allowed them to see.
(Translated by Lorina Xiaoyu Hou / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
