BGrandma would dress me in these little dresses, starched and
lavender-scented, and now I help her put on her good dress and tie her kerchief under her chin. Even now grandma tells me that I have hair of gold and I should wear it down, that God made beautiful things so they could be looked at. She smells of myrrh and faith, my grandma. She leaning on her cane, I standing tall as she raised me to do, we set off towards the church. The same treats in the basket, the same priest, the same emotion on grandma's face. Mrs. Safta, how many do you have? 10 living and 14 unborn, says grandma, swallowing her tears. And 15 grandchildren. She smiles a toothless smile.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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. 
