Grandparents' house smelled of newly whitewashed walls, of hay used for stuffing mattresses, and of freshly baked rolls. On the walls was such an old icon that you could barely see its story, sewn cloths which framed pictures with them in their youth and with their grandchildren. I was looking forward to the holidays in the countryside all year round. Now I'm all grown up, my grandparents are dead. Sometimes I dream that my grandma waits for me on the porch with steaming polenta and stories. Her caresses grazed my child smooth skin, but there was no greater luxury than there.
(Translated by Oana-Roxana Dicilea / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
