You climb the first step and come across dad's face. His life? A movie. He stuck his feet in it during the war and hid in the woods around the village. Then he came back a hardy soldier. He was even decorated. Two steps up, from a yellowed picture, my mother smiles. Another Oscar story. And in the bedroom you stumble over a guitar and an easel. They belong to a child whose moustache had just shown his face. There's a portrait, but they tell most stories, some of what it would have been like if he hadn't strayed.
(Translated by Cristina Șuică / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
