Stand up straight, with your shoulders and heels against the wall, my grandpa would tell me, while waving a blunt pencil over my head. The wall separated the shed from the kitchen, and grandpa used it to prove to himself how much I had grown over the summer holidays. The marks started near the base of the wall, from when I was barely standing, and ended abruptly one summer, when Grandpa passed away. Then the evidence of my growth disappeared, along with the wall sacrificed on the altar of an open space. I'm all grown up now.
(Translated by Oana Ionescu / 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. 
