We're playing
Country, country we want soldiers. Across the path in front of my house, the sunrays are playing too, the trampled grass is our living carpet, suited for running. I team up with my dear Lion Cub, because everyone else has their brothers to compete with. I take a deep breath, I work up the nerve to shout, because they usually don't hear me.
Coouuntry, coouuntry we want soldiers. Who? You. Lion Cub starts quickly wagging his tail, he gets ready and we are both off to the races to tear down the wall. It's just me in the end, the dog caught the scent of a mole on the way and forgot about me.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
