At the age of 87 I can barely move. In the dark, squalid alley, three strong young fellows show up in front of me. Greyhead, give me your wallet, quick, if you wanna be alive and well. What wallet? Are you messing with us? Fist punches, leg kicks, knife stabs and a baseball bat followed. After I got away, I landed on a plain stretched out to infinity, with wheat fields pierced by poppies. A godlike blue cloudless sky. The wind blows gently, ruffling the little child's hair that I am now. My dad takes my hand and gives me a kiss. How long I've been waiting for you.
(Translated by Alexandra Lica / 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 February 2022, the group has 7,950 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. 
