Maybe time is a child who quietly plays hopscotch, mindfully jumping in one foot, into the coloured squares, carefully throwing the rock to not land outside the line, resting from time to time, there where the chalk divided a circle or a rectangle in half. And now the child stands there and looks perplexed at the sidewalk in front of the apartment building, because last night's rain (or maybe your tear of yours) had washed the asphalt, the rain erased the drawing and left instead small jasmine petals, that time hasn't the heart to crush underneath his foot.
(Translated by Jessica-Polixenia-Cristiana Copilaș / 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. 
