Slowly, carefully, the little boy took the tin soldiers out of the wooden box, weighed them in his small, frail hands, then placed them in an order known only to him in the sand pit. A little further on, a little girl was whispering something to a doll dressed too warm for that weather. She has a cold, the little girl said complicitly to the little boy, she never listens to me. The elderly man sitting on the bench in front of them wiped away a tear, got up and shuffled off to the cemetery across the street.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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. 
