It is a painting of a bench from the park, nothing special, but something still bothers me. The old woman who is selling it at the fair takes my hand: do you like it? We met on this bench. My husband was serious, but stubborn, he had not asked for my address, he then waited for me here for three days and I painted it. I would come as well, hoping to find him because I liked him. I took him here and when he started to forget he would calm down and ask me what day it was. He would specifically remember that in three days at most his love would come. Don't you want a bench?
(Translated by Delia-Maria Cocoş / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
