For a couple of years I was raised by three nuns, who were under house arrest at our place, after the monastery had been closed by the secret police and they had been arrested. One of them was my Dad's sister. I was a little girl but I had existential questions in my mind. If not even the nuns could hear how I prayed, a hallway separating my room from theirs, then how could God hear me from the heaven? And if He could not hear, I risked being punished. To get away with it, I was kneeling and praying loudly, hitting my head off the floor. Hitting it hard, for them to hear me. Did you hurt yourself? I could hear the Nun asking. I was smiling, it meant that God had heard me too.
(Translated by Raluca Simion / 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. 
