They used to play in the park behind the block. In the green space with the
weather-destroyed benches, with the tress left without branches, an abandoned park where the wind was going on the rusty swings and the leaves were falling on the crooked slide, the kid came with his Labrador every day. In spite of his mother telling him to change the park, he kept going there. He knew that from a window with grey curtains, seated on an old chair, a very old man was waiting to see the kid playing with his dog.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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. 
