When uncle Titel has passed, the apartment building was in tears. Even the ones from the seventh floor who were behind with the bills and that he would always scold about leaving everyone without heat. Aunt Mia from the third floor put the barely to boil, and Mariusică who had the little shop on the ground floor ordered him a casket, towels and everything you might need for a funeral. Only that uncle Titel did not stay on the other side for too long because he woke up while in the recovery room. When he felt a little bit better he started sending texts to the apartments that hadn't read the watermeter index yet.
(Translated by Nina Iulia Tufă / 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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
