It's an evening like any other, except now I'm standing with my nose pressed against the window crying into the rain I can't hear because my parents are fighting again. When I grow up, I'm only going to hear the waves, the shores will caress me. High mountains with dense forests will keep my guard all around. Mom enters the room. She's all teared up and grabs my head, searching for my eyes in the dark and I tell her, Mommy, when I grow up, but she's in the middle of a storm and bluntly blazes up at me, Sweetheart, you're going to be a grown-up for the rest of your life, but a child, never again. I'm silent. I have a plan.
(Translated by Oana Ionescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by conf. dr. Daria Protopopescu / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
