was ol' Luca, dressed in a slate grey jumpsuit, full of multicoloured drops of paint. He smelled of freedom and lacquer. I'd been slammed against this wall countless times. Forbeing a good student. For smokes. For having long hair. For the puppy I got from the guard. All right, ol' Luca, but the rainbow leads to the boys' bathroom. Was this necessary? At the end of it, cockroaches squirm in puddles of urine. My dear, the end is not here. It's behind you, towards the staffroom. It's the promise that you'll be out of here in a year.
(Translated by Oana-Roxana Dicilea / 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. 
