Ten-twenty-thirty-forty-one hundred, he counted fast, cheating. Coming, ready or not, he said and thought of grandpa's shovel, the one he uses when he poured cement at the house's brink. Whenever he would see him shoveling the wet sand, he would think of his grandmother's dough for doughnuts. He craved doughnuts with cherry jam. Then he started thinking about Miruna, with her cherry lips and blackberry eyes. His small chest let out a sigh. I'm no longer playing, he said as he tore himself away from his childhood, I'm going home.
(temă în parteneriat cu Ideo Ideis, 2022)(Translated by Liliana Popescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
