He walks slowly, carrying his bones with the dignity of the heavy years gathered on his back. From time to time, he stops and sniffs. A smell, a tremor, a desire. His knees can not sustain long distances and for 30 years he has been stopping on the same bench. Over the white fence, the now abandoned garden stretches. If he closes his eyes, he sees her on the swing under the linden. Her fresh cheerful laughter covers all the humming of the evening. The translucent dress is moving with the warm wind and the fire of the sunset hugs her hair. It's one of those times when the shades of the past whip him unto blood.
(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. 
