I used to tell her: mom, when night comes, death comes. And my mother was crying without tears and mechanically stroking my head. I repeated this over and over again hoping she would understand everything I couldn't say. My brain went offline along with the hospital room. Out of the darkness, hands bloomed on my body, crazy carnivorous plants clinging and flapping, frantically looking for moist places to plant their roots. And the darkness flowed over me, sticky and fetid. There I learned to hate the ones close to me as myself.
(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. 
