He led him silently as if in agreement, and encouraged him by caressing his frail shoulders as he first carried his schoolbag, the little boy just blinked at him smiling warmly. He wasn't the first carried through barren ground and out of strong winds on his way to life. He dropped him off in the freshly painted classroom with oil-scented floors and leaned against the glass wall beckoning him to wait for him. When the buzz of the tender hive ceased the lady asked him: where do you live? The little boy looked up at the window and pointed. There, at the Sunflower Orphanage.
(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. 
