The family's watching a Western. A puffing steam train rolls up into a decrepit train station with a wooden platform. The
6-year-old girl smiles 'Grandma, do you remember when I had a lung illness and you used to take me to the train station to inhale the engine smoke?' Grandma looks at her funny: 'Carla, I've told you before that it's not nice to lie.' The child sighs, 'I'm not lying. It was cold and raining. And my chest hurt so much. And I was scared of the carriage horses. You were my mother and I was sad. And I was a boy. You've just forgotten.'
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Ciucașu / 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 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. 
