He swigs from the bottle and looks at the sky. Good thing it's not raining. Frost can handle it, but wet nights are the absolute pain. At the shelter he showered and ate, but there alcohol is a forbidden whim. He stretches out on the bench that is his home. He used to have a mother. Too bad he left without knowing that he loved her. He doesn't know his father. His thoughts begin to mix, his legs become stiff, but a feeling of well-being envelops him and he falls asleep. Maybe tomorrow it will be as the shelter told him. Every person matters.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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. 
