"The patient is with us in the emergency room", a voice tells me on the phone. I get dressed in a hurry and leave. Along the way, I think of all sorts of more sinister, more contradictory thoughts. Am I free? It's been thirty years since this psychopath has been abusing me. She's my mother, but I want her to disappear. I get to the hospital and I ask where she is. I've been answered dryly: "Room 101". I open the door at the thought that she has taken her last breath. Enter. I see her. She looks up, "I'm fine now, are you taking me home?" I smile bitterly for another day with her.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / 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 January 2022, the group has 7.830 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. 
