I was doing volunteering work in a centre of people with disabilities. For some time, my attention had been drawn by a little kid who was a 4-5-year-old deaf mute. He was pale, feeble, withdrawn, didn't socialize with others, had a bitter smile hanging at the corner of his mouth. Very intelligent, he drew from his imagination and so passed the time. I signed and asked him to tell me why he wouldn't play with other kids and how he feels about the others. He looked at me, opened his notebook and quickly sketched a wall for me, he stood on one side, and the rest of the world on the other.
(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. 
