Mom, this is Radu, an old friend. I watched the sandy knees of my little son and how he was gesturing happily in the company of the kid he had just met in the park. They could understand each other just by looking at each other, they completed their sentences and you could swear they had known each other for ever. How sad he was when we left and he had to say goodbye to Radu. At home, he asked me to see again his photo from the maternity hospital, when I took a picture of him through the pane window with another baby. Here's Radu. I told you he was an old friend.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Ilie / 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 March 2022, the group has 8,050 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. 
