I had just turned eight. I was living with my grandma and was really unhappy. She was very strict and I wasn't allowed to do much of anything. I was constantly being punished. I missed my mom very much and I wanted to go back home, where it smelled of Titan. That night, grandma burned her communist card in her kitchen sink, and from the windows you could hear bullets piercing the air. The next day people shouted
Freedom. Grandma told me that mom was coming to take me home. Freedom. After two weeks I returned to my grandma. It was the same, but without a communist card.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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. 
