God would strike me down if he heard me say that the underbelly of the earth wasn't warm and cozy. Because it was. But a naughty little sliver of light was reaching through two clumps of soil and tickling me, leaving me restless. Because I knew what it was like, I had already been born once, last year, and I liked it a lot. My neighbors seemed to be on their first birth, they kept squirming and pushing. That's not how you do it. You have to feel it. Last time, the ground spit me out too quick and too low. I hadn't found what I had been promised in the underbelly. Higher, higher, a seed in the sky.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
