It was nice around '75 at Modern. First taste of the sea. I was fascinated by the ads on Vacation Radio about lost children. I imagined it was like kindergarten, and the parents would come one by one to pick them up. No, Mom, I hadn't disappeared underwater. I'd swiped a leu from your bag when you were dozing off and taken some money from a gypsy. I was under the willow tree, 10 meters behind you, in the shade. You gathered up the blanket and went to the cousin who was hosting us. You came back an hour later. I didn't hear you put me on the radio. You beat me for nothing then.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
