I hold my phone against my ear and listen to my lover, mute. Don't let yourself be swallowed the dark, he says with determination. Look for the light and envelop yourself with it. You will shine, you will see. You can find it everywhere, it's all around you, in the simplest joys. I know, you have everything you want, and so do I. I don't lack anything, I have all the comfort I can have, I have a lot of light in me. OK, I told him, I got the light thing. What are you doing now, where are you? i ask him. I am home in the dark. I forgot to pay the electricity bill.
(Translated by Monica-Andreea Gaman / 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. 
