I wake up covered in sweat, I dreamed that I was falling into the void. I get up quickly, she is in the other bedroom. She is sitting on the edge of the bed, with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for time to pass by. Get dressed, we have to go. My voice has a unnatural, metallic sound. She doesn't look at me. I thought, I don't think there is something wrong with me. I don't have any symptoms. I want to go home. I feel like I'm holding her, but I've never done that. Mom, you know, the biopsy says the opposite. Shut up. The sunrise is sneaking through the horizontal blinds filter, drawing strange shadows on the wall.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
