It's a piercing February. The wind whips the streets and souls, violetly turning over the ruins of walls that were once homes. With her head up, she goes straight for a statue-like soldier - tall, broad, armed. She,a little girl, questions him, a big man, - what are you doing here, what do you want from us? Her bravery fogs the lens of onlookers around the world, and the sunflower seeds she offers him are a heavy curse. From the pocket of a child, sent to the front to kill and die, will spring the flowers of war.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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. 
