Beyond their fence spreads the sunflower field. He steps out barefoot without anyone seeing him and runs down the path until he is out of sight in the field. Under the hot sun, the ripe seeds already smell of traditional donuts. The child cuts a flower the size of a wheel. He sits on the ground and begins to eat hungrily. A few steps away she is there too. Clear, on a tall piece of wood, like a Jesus in rags guarding the flowers. The clothes are her mother's. Mother's not coming back. The child embraces her, peels flying with burning, aching longings.
(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. 
