We met on the train. He was reading a book about Kung Fu, and I was watching him secretly. He looked at me and smiled. Then he told me he was a Shaolin Master and gave me the address of the temple where he lived. I wished I had followed him then, because his presence calmed me. How do I, a man, feel about this man? The first thoughts frightened me and I ran home and locked myself in the room no one knew about. The room where I whipped myself and tortured myself for my feelings, forbidden in these places. Alpha.
(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. 
