Grandma's sweet jam. Red as blood. When I was 15, I used to come home with my friends. And she took out the jar and a whole loaf of bread, barely browned. When they heard her say that, my friends were moved, but I was just ashamed. It was only a jam. And everyone else had bread from the store. Only we were poor. Eventually, I stopped bringing colleagues home. I've been looking at the jar for
three-quarters of an hour. It's the last one she made. When it ends, what will I do when I miss her?
(Translated by Denisa Dărăban / 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. 
