In front of my balcony there's a cherry tree. When I was a kid, I got very angry with my father and I threw a Walkman at it. I recovered it the next day, when my anger was gone. The summer evenings, when I was learning for my high school graduation exam, I was looking at its gorgeous white flowers and I was dedicating poems to it. When I flunked the Faculty admission exam, the cherry tree was there to let me know it was not the end of the world. The end of the world came a few years later, when it was cut down. In its place there's the statue of all my memories before I grew up.
(Translated by R.C. / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 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. 
