They have been friends for 50 years. Their husbands had died on the same day, bad hearts. Their apartments were next to each other and they had a happy life. One day a gentleman moved into the building. They used to wait for him to come home so they could go and sweet talk him. They both liked him and neither wanted to concede. When one of them stayed talking with the gentleman, she got smacked by the other. A 10-minute brutal fight ensued. The man, disgusted, called them crazy and left. The next day he was found dead. Also a bad heart. The friends resumed their leisurely lives, but one day
(Translated by Ioana Diana Sandu / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
