My mother was 70 and she, a little girl, had just turned 22. They were chatting and the little one said she was afraid and realized she would never be the same, and some of the wings she had prepared for life's flight would be gone. Her mother would comfort her and explain that she too was young and had been through many trials and, lo and behold, she is now 70. The young woman began to cry and her mother took her hand in hers. And so they were both wheeled into the operating theatre, their hands perfused but joined.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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. 
