When Aritia paid a boatman to take her away from those stinking puddles, she first threw her things in the boat, then climbed in, without looking back, as if she feared the Lord would turn her into a pillar of salt. All night long she sat in the train station, clutching her ticket in her fist and talking to herself. Is it bad to want more than you have? Is it a sin to leave the man to whom you were given? When home is not your home, it's no use for the sun to rise, the night is not about darkness, it's about morning.
(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / 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. 
