Look, a ball, I shake it, kneeling, bending over to get below his eye level, as instructed. 2, 3, 4, he points in the direction of the unseen things to be counted and ordered. Look at me, I have a car, vroom, I'm frantically miming excitement, the way I've been told to. Red, orange, yellow, he curves, in the air between us, the rays of his own rainbow. Look at mommy, I'm almost screaming, I'm blowing soap bubbles, they float and pop. Our eyes met in the middle of a luminous sphere. Pop, he whispered. And that's it, I fall apart.
(Translated by Andreea Teodorescu-Colciu / 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. 
