Mom, do you love everyone, everybody in the world? No, I love a few that I know. About how many? I don't know, baby, maybe 20, maybe 50, I never counted. It's good that you don't love everyone, I don't love everyone either, otherwise we would go crazy. Why do you think so? Do you hear that Ambulance siren? You can hear Ambulance sirens all the time. If we loved all the people in the world, we would be frightened every time an Ambulance siren is heard. This way, we only get scared 50 times, so it's much better to love just a few.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Ilie / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
