After hearing my father starting to snore in his room, I pull out from under the bed the book, the candle and the matchbox. I'm not allowed to turn on the light bulb, electricity is too expensive. In one hand I hold the book, in the other the candle. At one point, I drop the candle. The room gets warm and filled with a lot of light. The quilt caught fire. I throw the book under the bed and start screaming. After my fathermanaged to put out the fire with a bucket of water, he took a belt and beat me. When he left the room, I curled up on the rug and lit the candle again. I had a story to finish.
(Translated by Tania Diniță / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
