Parking is free for 500 years

The car seemed to be parked by the book. A hundred-year-old model. Riddled with flyers.
That's probably why he didn't notice its seniority, although he had been out patrolling every night, in a city where nothing ever happens. He only felt like a policeman when he was watching 20th Century movies, where detectives were solving cases. He checked the dispatch message. That was indeed the former parking spot. He checked the license plate again. He hadn't been wrong. He was still stalling. He had never fined a car before.

(Translated by Ruxandra Ioana Vasile / 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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale.