He always has the the big book with the students' names in his hand. He lines us up, asks us to solve problems at the table, confuses us with one question at a time, snorting when he doesn't like the answer. At 86 years old, he has a sharp mind. She looks like her grandmother, who Iwas afraid of, as I was a kid. I look at her and find in her the features of a race of beautiful and fierce women. I sometimes forget how old I am. I'm back to being a teenager, bewitched by my mother's gaze and encouraged by my father's guiding smile. I write and the cigarette smoke envelops me like a fog. If only they knew I smoke. I resemble to dad.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
