I met her in the village my grandparents lived in, one summer break. We liked to roam the hills. Sometimes we'd pick daisies, sit in the shade of a tree, and I'd watch her as she braided flower crowns. Other times, we'd sit shyly on the little bridge over the stream and watch the relentless flow of water. We scribbled our names with a rock on one of the wooden beams. That's where I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. The years have passed, now I'm a bridge architect and she became my wife. Sometimes we go to that stream to recall our first kiss.
(Translated by Ana Stănilă / 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. 
