She remembered Tom each time John hit her. Get married to John; he's from around here, the hooligan you met at camp said nothing and it's been 4 years sine then, her parents kept telling her. She didn't think that the boy who hadn't even kissed her was a hooligan, but what they said and the fact that she had no news about him made her make up her mind. Stuff happens, said her parents, giving her the brush when she talked to them about the beatings. After their death, Ann, now old, discovered hundreds of letters from Tom tucked in a chest in the attic. I'm getting married, Ann, without having any idea why you never replied to me, his last letter said.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / 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. 
