There were better times, we didn't have smartphones and we didn't even know what a selfie is. With the arrival of spring, our parents only saw us in the evening when we returned home hungry. Our call was the
name-calling under the balcony and then running through all the gardens. We were gathering a gang of about twenty. The boys were still playing football while the girls were competing to make wreaths of fresh flowers. We've been called the
latchkey kids. All we had on us was the key and the joy.
(Translated by Georgiana Carmen Rădulescu / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
