I had just come out from
Ikiru (To live), a Kurosawa movie, you know which. I entered the first restaurant, I remember it had an odd name, maybe that's why I went in, it was called At the End of the Rainbow. I felt like it was a sign, a final sign. It was a classic Japanese restaurant with karaoke, and once a week, lonely people sought to be someone else there, because we live in a country that forbids you to be somebody else than what it's written in your fate to be. In order to live other lives, you have to come here. I sang or vomited, I can't remember.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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. 
