A long pass towards Răducu. He manages to keep it and he sends the ball to Mario. A successful intervention from Ionuţ, who takes over and shoots the ball right into the gate. Noooo. The ball whooshes past the steel bars where they clean rugs, and ends up hitting the rearview mirror of a Volkswagen. The match halts to a stop. Everyone scrambles to their apartment complexes. Later that day, Ionuţ is standing near the apartment door with a bag of corn puffs in hand. The gentleman wishes to know if you were the one who broke his rearview mirror. No, mom.
(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. 
