I smiled back at him after each blow I took. It hurt, but my father didn't need to see that. The crises only lasted a few minutes, after which everything went back to normal. The bruises look like a sunset, and I am starting to get used to them. In his moments of lucidity, he recounts to me about how he met my mother and how they started their life with only one set of cutlery. He always remembers what she was wearing on their first date. Then he prays to God to take him, as he is in the terminal stage of missing her.
(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. 
