I look at my father's wrinkled face and I wonder how many of themare caused by me. I put them in the order in which I believed they appeared. Wrinkle number 12 is from when I broke my legin eighth grade, playing football. The 19
th one is from when I told him my college girlfriend was pregnant. The deepest one, the 35
th, is from when I moved to America. The most recent one is from when he called and I haven't picked up immediately. Many of them are because of me. I wish I could smooth them out, but I can't.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
