After Vlad, I wasn't even able to cry at funerals. He was 18 years old, God hadn't been fair with him, with me. After a couple of years, dad was gone, and then, mom was gone. I looked at them disinterestedly, like an ice floe. The relatives would talk about it, would grumble behind my back. She doesn't care, I kept hearing. One night, he came to my dream. Mom, there is no one guilty. It was something natural to happen, I was born with an anchor on my forehead. You laughed, you thought that I would be a sailor. I threw myself in the sea and I could mourn the others.
(Translated by Ana Maria Adriana Oprea / 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 March 2021, the group has 4.300 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. 
