Rumor had it that the bad guys lived in that apartment building. As soon as his mother told him not to play there, he felt his curiosity gnawing at him. So he took heart and went to scout. When he arrived nearby, he found an abandoned playground and, behind the rusty slide, a little girl. Do you want to play together, he asked her casually. The little girl looked at him in wonder. Why would someone like you play with me? Because we're both children, he answered, taking her hand and planting a smile on her dirty face.
(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. 
