The last guests left around 4. I counted the money and put the gifts in the car. I picked her up and carried her across the threshold. I saw an umbilical cord, long and gelatinous, getting through her flowered lace wedding dress, to which her mother, eternally sad and elegant, her father, almost asleep, her brother, drunk and cheerful, her sister, mysterious and conceited, plus her maternal grandpa, hard and cold, were tied. They got undressed and got themselves cozy in the bed. I slept on the floor.
(Translated by Paula-Silvia Codescu / 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 March 2021, the group has 4.500 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. 
