Almost all of them with urinary incontinence, few teeth and their flesh smelling of mothballs. Grouchy and naive. They sleep a lot and when they aren't asleep they pace back and forth, searching with trembling hands for a purpose that is no longer theirs. They chew on memories and helplessly scribble on the walls of the retirement home. Except for her. She is still a woman. She frivolously balances her years on her
high-heels and paints her vitality in the incandescent red on her lips. Because she is Death. She's come to take them away, turn them into children beyond age.
(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. 
