The crêpes with cherry jam on my birthday. The smell of cinnamon during winter. Tom and Jerry chasing each other across the blinking screen. Headbands, sewn by you. I choose to keep these. I leave it to history to forget the rest: the empty chair at every festivity, the frustration at having to raise me on your own, the reproach that I'm like my father, the too-empty fridge, and all too often the sadness of knowing that I was, in fact, the parent, and you were the child. If I were to raise myself again, I would allow myself to be a child. At least a little.
(temă în parteneriat cu
Ideo Ideis, 2022)
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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. 
