I come to see him every day. I tell him about Stelian, Fritz and Gheo, who never forget to send him some brown, unfiltered beer. His innocent pleasure. I clean, change the water to the flowers. I tear myself away from him late in the evening, when the Moon fills the night. He doesn't like being alone. All his life he was afraid of loneliness. And of darkness. I always told him that the darkness inside him is worse than the darkness outside. Today, it's time to put in a good word, at the Bearded One. To turn darkness into light. 40 days have passed.
(Translated by Andreea Denisa Dinu / 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. 
