On the 29th of April, when my first child was born, my husband planted an oak in our back yard. I told myself that this tree would brood over my little girl, he would watch her bloom, then become a young lady, then a wife, then a mother herself; he would watch her give me grandchildren who, in turn, would play under the oak. And just like that, for hundreds of years, entire generations would bask in the beauty and the shade of the oak tree, born alongside my own miracle. When my daughter turned 25, she told me adamantly: mom, I will become a nun.
(Translated by Ioana Grigoruţă / 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 June 2021, the group has 6.650 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. 
