He would take anything to feel his feet again. A moment of negligence, and now he looks at his child being carried on shoulders by others. The doctors looked at him with pity, and the friends forgot him. Only the boy does not detach himself from him and encourages him with tears imprinted in childhood: Come on, Daddy, you are the strongest. Come on you can. He shakes his hand and despair grips his soul. He can not. He wished he could, but he can't. He doesn't even believe in miracles anymore, even though at first he was glad he was still alive.
(Translated by Andreea Theodora Drăgan / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
