Everything has to end. Yesterday my last tooth fell out. The daughter of the MustacheMan is a dentist. She told me she would make dentures for me. For what good? The food stays untouched in the bowl. Last night Old Martin dropped by. When I saw him through the fence, I became dead silent. He saw me too, but he kept walking. He has no need of my stringy meat, plums are what he wants in the autumn. I will miss the small quarrels with the kids, the trips to the mountainside and that baths in Vidraru lake, but the most I feel bad for the Mustache Man because I leave him alone. I want to stay next to him, here, under the walnut tree.
(Translated by Diana-Maria Croitoru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 September 2021, the group has 7.150 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. 
