I'm not saying that my apartment complex neighbor is old, but if I were to take a wild guess, I suspect that when the shepherd Bucur and his flock of sheep set foot on this land, he was welcomed with some good old fashioned hard liquor by this gentleman. They must have discussed the issues of parking spots and invented ADPs during the first night. A lot has changed since then: houses, streets, parks and buildings have popped up here and there, and the city has been riddled with cars. And every morning, as if making a toast to his perseverance, he goes to slip off the cover from his Dacia and wipes the car down with a rag: coat of paint still of an intense red, after 500 years.
(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. 
