Upon my grandfather's death, my barely issued ID fell into the wine bucket at the cemetery. My brother was laughing at me as we walked through the mud carrying the bag of food, each by one handle, with wine jugs in our other hand, mine being a 10 liter one, and his a 20 liter. I was 14, he was 21. 1983. Entrusted with such a task, I felt I was no longer a kid. We got on the train with the purplish document, as there were no tickets at the way station. Ever since then, I've been burying relatives, friends, colleagues, people who were, once upon a time. I'm waiting for my turn to come.
(Translated by Ioana Diana Sandu / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
