Petrică's grandmother told her nephew how her life changed one day. Her husband and her two sons left at the break of dawn to the vigil of a relative from the neighboring village. Bad luck followed them, because the border was drawn behind them - some kind of fence that could not be jumped, had no gate or stile. Their lives have changed. They approached the border and sang in the summer. Through the lyrics they shouted their longing. Grandma and her daughter squealed as they wiped their tears in their handkerchiefs and their hearts shattered.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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. 
