I'd been in Berlin for ten months. It was hard for me but I didn't admit it. I knew little German, had no friends, couldn't go home. I had very little presence in my own life. I boarded the train mechanically, changed trains at Friedrichstraße, went to my workplace, worked, left my workplace, changed trains. One night, I overheard him when he was getting off the train next to me: I'm coming home. A Romanian kid, probably a student, probably on the phone with his family, with someone dear. My heart went through a shock at that word, home, it demolished everything I wouldn't admit to having built.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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. 
