Our teacher took us to an orphanage to meet the children there, to play with them and bring them some sweets. My classmates swooped in on the blonde,
curly-haired beautiful children. That's when I saw her sitting alone in a corner, the
cross-eyed brunette girl. I went to her and we shared some candy. I was ten years old, she five and a bit.
I went home and I begged my parents to adopt her. They said they couldn't, we were poor apparently.
I've been missing her in the pictures from family gatherings ever since.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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. 
