He was saving me from the endless afternoon nap. I'll take the girl and we'll go for a walk, he said, smiling complicitly at me, no longer hearing the objections, which came noisily from the kitchen, enveloped in the smell of roasted peppers. In his arms, the penicillin shot tickled me and the needle felt like a feather. Let my girl play, he whispered to her illness, and she left ashamed of where she came from. One day, Someone sent him somewhere else. I think other kids needed him more. I called him Dad. How would they be calling him?
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
