He was seven months old, that's all he got on earth. I was looking at him and I didn't understand how a human being could be so yellow. I was a racist at ten years old. The people were weeping silently, and the spiral candle gathered all sorts of little nocturnal creatures by the window, so I was flinching at every butterfly that would bump into the window. My grandmother told me to kiss the coffin and I felt sick. I went out and swore I would never go to another wake. I broke my oath very soon after.
(Translated by Andreea-Simona Trufin / 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 February 2021, the group has 4.300 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. 
