I iron out my mom's wrinkles with tales for the smoothing of foreheads, by retelling childhood stories. She likes the Story of Peter Pan the most. We remember my dad sometimes, but we change the subject quickly and go to Pinocchio's story. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, anyway. We lie to ourselves that we live a happy life. But actually, we run the show without order. I thought that I had to do something wild, to bring me back to the real world. I went bungee jumping. The instructor didn't strap me in the right way. Panic. Thank God for the umbilical cord.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
