Where I come from, cold shadows always feed on warm dreams. Hell, for us, is the hunger, always unsatisfied for illusions. We are doomed to believe our own dreams, because our reality is that the shadows are long and cold, and the light grows dimmer and colder. And in semi-darkness, you can only dream or worry. The shadows penetrate the thoughts, sometimes until everything becomes dark. People call it a sanatorium, but I know it's just the flesh of shadows and the blood of dreams.
(Translated by Andreea Ciubuc / 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. 
