This is where my friendships began. It was actually behind the block. A vacant lot surrounded by ugly blocks, comfort two. Where does childhood get the power to beautify everything? That place was the garden of heaven. It was where all the A and B kids would gather in the evenings and play hide-and-seek, at night, when you could still see the stars in the sky, telling horror stories. A carpet beater bar endured all my attempts to become Nadia. When we moved to a better apartment building I longed for my heaven.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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 July 2022, the group has 8,750 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. 
