I was coming home happy from school, where I had been given my grades for the final middle school exam. My mother, crushed by depression, was looking for ways to escape. I, smiling, was accepting congratulations. She, sad, had put the plug in the bathtub. I was skipping down the way home. She, crying, turned on the water. I had stopped to share my happiness with someone right in front of the door. She had put the two wires of the broken boiler in the water. I went in. She screamed. I calmed her down. The clash of the two worlds was short-circuited.
(Translated by Bianca-Andreea Rîmboacă / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
