Mom, what do you measure love with? Here's some food for thought from this little guy, as if I didn't already have enough on my mind with the chickpea meatballs, laundry to fold, Maltese to walk on the shoreline of Bahlui River, my daughter's Romanian homework which is a descriptive composition, a not too discreet leak from the kitchen faucet, and now a rugrat's existential dilemma about a possible unit of measurement for love. I burst into tears, held him tight and lied by saying I don't know.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
