Before you put an end to things, tie up the loose ends within yourself as many times as you need, but one of us will end up losing all the same, whispered the darkness within me. I slowly finished my thought like I would a glass of dry, red wine. Then I pushed the glass against the wall and stood up - you have my eyes, I whispered, no matter the look. Don't change your intentions, you are who I am. Whoever feels a stranger to themselves loses. How long will the dance last? One step? Too short? Two steps? Too long? All of them, until the end.
(Translated by Carla Bețianu / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
