First he invited me into his kitchen. The next day, in his bedroom. Then, as the relationship advanced, he introduced me, one room at a time, to every room in his soul. But I felt there was one place he avoided taking me. Out of fear, out of shame, I have no idea why. This hiding place of him became my goal. I had to find out all his secrets. After about five years, he gave up. He let me in where no one else had gone in. I left him. It was too boring to live with a man who had no door to open.
(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. 
