He was a charming man like only a train mechanic could be. Family man and a devoted father, a true professional and a man of symmetry, Sandu supported two houses, one at each end of the line. Not a single soul would have known if he hadn't messed around with the switchman's wife from that miserable stopover and if they hadn't been stuck like fools, while the Satu Mare train was crashing into the one from Huși. The coworkers are offering comfort for the grieving widows in these sad times, willingly, with no strings attached.
(Translated by Ruxandra Adriana Dodoiu / 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. 
