Every three years, this would happen. He couldn't sleep well, he was always blacked out, he didn't eat, he didn't go into the office to write for days. A great trouble, until, in cafés, he would come across his future muse, and then his days would suddenly come alive, like an old black and white film that had been colourised. He'd blush, he'd get flushed, he'd miss nights at home, he'd come home all bothered and cheerful, exhausted, but he'd write two books one after the other. His wife put up with him for a day or two, then went to spend his money in Paris.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / 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. 
