She heads to the TV in the middle of the drawing toom. She raises the fish with great care, caressing the glass fins with wrinkly fingers stiff with arthritis. Then, the doily, from when she was learning how to crochet. She placed them gently on the table. She strained herself one more time and reached the armchair, on the armrest of which the TV remote was lying,
plastic-wrapped. She pushed the button. A loud voice started to pour out rapes, attacks, accidents, the pandemic, and a lot of death. She froze
wide-eyes and entered eternity surprised.
(Translated by Alexandra Handrea / 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. 
