The grandma finishes darning a big web cloth and she throws it to me, gesturing with the hand a cross on her head. The grandpa is bringing with him all his stories and throws them directly to my face. On the cheeks, three aunts are complaining, and between the eyebrows, two uncles are fighting. On the forehead, my mom examines my attire with a critical eye, disagreeing by raising her eyebrow. My dad jumps bipolarly from the right eye to the left eye, once laughing, once crying, or showing the emergency exit. Me, with my lips vaguely sketched, I shut up.
(Translated by Beatrice-Ioana Huruială / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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. 
