She had moved in with him against Ana's will. I don't accept you being as unhappy as I was, his mother had shouted. He loves me, said her over her shoulder and stopped talking to her. Without any complaint, for 20 years she endured his indifference, the poison leaking about other women, the insults. Silent, she walked the streets like a shadow. One day she received the news that Ana was gone. She went straight to the closet, picked up 20 unopened Envelope sheets, sewn by Ana, sent to her every year for her birthday, looked at him like a stranger and left.
(Translated by Otilia Mocanu / 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 October 2021, the group has 7.275 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.