soldiers were sitting, right there, huddled together - some tired Germans, some Russians with a lust for women, some noisy Americans - that's what my grandmother said. For many years there was a boundary between handsome houses and dilapidated ones, but still no pavement, only a few stones from place to place that I jumped on like a goat to save my shoes from the mud - that's what my mother said. I remember it having a hastily made sidewalk, marked withwild blue phlox, with a water fountain, with carts I used to hang on to steal corn. I carried the dust on my feet into the schools. Now history alone roams the road.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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. 
