Bruised knees, tended by her, the way she sometimes hid from my pain because it hurt more, her fried eggs with polenta, the way she rubbed her
hard-working hands in winter when she warmed herself by the stove. She went away, nothing was enough to keep him from taking her away from me. Today I found among her things a small pill wrapped in a white handkerchief and swallowed it without thinking. I don't know how, but my granny knew ever since 14 years ago, ever since when she left, that she was going to kill me with longing and wanted us to live again, from the beginning.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Marinescu / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
