This upright wrinkle in the middle of my forehead is out of dissatisfaction, I was born with it, predestined to not ever be satisfied. When I was born, everything in my house was old, nothing was new; the house was just as old. My father said I would cry a lot, almost all the time, it was exasperating and I now think I might've never wanted to be born. As soon as I was able to walk I ran up the hill, straight into the woods. They found me. I was barely eating, I think I was trying not to depend on anything, I grew up frail and slow-witted, dissatisfied with everyone, including with myself.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
