K. used to be a bricklayer, not really a bricklayer, a carpenter, or even that; he couldn't even finish the chair he was sitting on and dreaming. He'd picked it up from a trade fair. But he built a room around it, just like that, sitting on his bottom. Well, that's not bad, is it? But what do I call a room? A whole castle built around it, with fortifications, with whatever your imagination wants, that no one's seen it, but in the fog. Here's my nightmare, K. said to follow my obsessions ruthlessly. Maybe I'll even make his castle visible. To whoever wants to see it, of course.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / 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. 
