The old woman, as the village knows her, tossed water from her small glass bottle after the deceased one. Water is a smooth passage, but it's no good to step in it. Since the village has existed, the old woman brings the water. One day, she hopped into the cart and stopped in town. She chose a coffin as small as her, with a greatly carved wreath into it. She paid for it and took it home. And she waited for the night. After five years, the grandchildren put it in the manger and filled it with hay. The horse was chewing peacefully. The old woman was tossing water after the dead, then she started wailing into her headscarf: what if I will be the only one left of my people, God?
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
