It must have been 50 years since he married Floarea. She birthed five children. There wasn't even one around to ease their old-age. All of them left abroad and neither returned. A nephew was the only one who stepped in their yard, with a bag of kindness. A lot of time has passed, and now there's only a little left, Mărin thought. And he was packing up tobacco in a sheet, reeking with disgust. Even if he had been in purgatory and the flames of longing wouldn't have burned him like this, consuming the last coals of hope. Don't you worry, Floare, there'll be heaven in the yard, when they would be carrying my coffin.
(Translated by Georgiana Morozii / 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 July 2022, the group has 8,750 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. 
