Already the park was showing off an outfit from the autumn collection. She stopped, looked around, and sat down on the only other bench where someone was sitting, an elegant man. For a while they didn't speak or look at each other. Then she put a newspaper on the bench, from which he took a few pictures, and looked at that childish face out of a cliché. He laughed and cried, but no one saw him because there was no one to see him. She got up to leave, he raised a hand as if he wanted to tell her something and she nodded: of course.
(Translated by Cristina-Nicoleta Costache (Mircea) / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
