I wear a white robe and I have a student card in my pocket. I don't feel like I'm in a hospital, because HER hospital room smells of songs and childhood. HER eyes recite prayers and they are as blue as the sky in which she is to live. I kiss her bruised hand, I put my head on her breast, I listen and I feel her leave. 500 characters is not enough for me. Nothing reaches HER. How do you notify a relative that the patient is dead? When the relative is the mother and the patient was the grandmother. This lesson was not taught by anyone. I'm afraid to be a doctor.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Ilie / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
