The child has blonde hair and big green eyes. It could be a tomboyish girl or a delicate boy; sunburned skin, bruised knees. The child climbs up the ladder leaning against the entrance of the attic and shoves a few bunches of dried grapes into the shirt. It starts to go down, but it changes its mind and takes a handful of plums. Then it goes to the tally stick on the door frame and cuts a notch. The child tells itself it's a sin to lie, cuts another notch and springs into the yard singing, Dad's at war, mom's sweeping the porch and I'll hang from a beam.
(Translated by Andreea Ciubuc / 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. 
