I slip through a sea of velvety roses, slender, sky-tall gladioli, and disheveled chrysanthemums to reach my class's spot, marked in chalk on the schoolyard's asphalt. I hold my mother's hand and float behind her footsteps, behind the fine fragrance I would recognize from a thousand. Someone calls my name and beckons me forward, near the white line. I blink three times and end up on the other side of the chalk mark. Curious eyes look at me and a crystal-clear voice calls me Miss.
(Translated by Adrian-George Ilinca / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
