My sister is only five years old. She is afraid of the dark. She cries. I am a boy. Boys don't cry. But I am afraid too. I'm hugging her tightly. She wants mommy. I want her too. Hours passed. It's getting cold. She calmed down. She's not crying anymore. She's just sighing. She's asking me if God is angry with her because she's been naughty. If that's why he tore our house down. I'm telling her everything will be alright. Soon we'll be in a beautiful, bright and warm place that has all the candy in the world. Mommy and daddy are waiting for us there.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
