He was a man with deep-set eyes and a beard that looked blue. Women were attracted to his way of loving them. They were queens, he gave them everything, wealth, freedom and all the flowers in the world. They chose to love him who was like a cave, open but dark. He told them sadly: you can have it all, but without entering that room. Gradually, everything lost its value, the secret room grew larger, his sadness increased. Repeatedly, the restlessness of curiosity, led them to the room where they found their death. Why?
(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. 
