In a faraway country, there once was a mother who wasn't waiting in a chair by a hospital bed in which lay a little boy put on a drip. She wasn't dizzy tired. Her heart wasn't pumping with anxiety and worries weren't flashing through her hands. She was clean, elegant, her socks were
well-matched. Her hair was combed, her teeth brushed. She had just had breakfast in peace. She embraced her thoughts with a smile, listening to music, imagining that she's dancing kizomba on the street, at night, in the light of the streetlights. Yes, that's how it was. If it weren't the case, it wouldn't have been told.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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. 
