The children were playing soccer on the artificial turf, and he remembered the times when he was their age, playing in the dust, with torn sneakers and two stones for a goalpost. He had finished writing the article at 4 am. His eyes were red, and he was hit by trigeminal neuralgia again. His upstairs neighbours were renovating, and he couldn't sleep, so he went to the park to get some fresh air before the 11 AM Zoom call. You're so lucky, his colleagues said to him. EU funding, a workplace that values diversity. Two overweight security guards stood in front of him. What are you doing here, you gypsy? Watching the kids? You're not from here, are you? Piss off.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
