I soon realized I couldn't do anything to change myself. I was living in my own skin like a dead end. It was around that time that I started taking my mother's medication. Maybe I was transitioning into her. Maybe life was flying by. Maybe I didn't care anymore, just like she didn't. As they were raising me brick by brick, building the long-awaited child, deep down I was planning my exit. It was too late when they found out I was no longer there. My eyes and hair were there, but my mind had escaped. Family is the wall that crushes you if you don't let go.
(Translated by Oana Ionescu / 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. 
