What I had and lost, Mary of the Rooster, was booing from the bottom of his heart, in the wagon, next to her husband, taking him to the pit, with one hand holding his pants, under the leather belt, so he wouldn't fall in the bumps. Behind the wagon, Saveta from next door and Blegu's old lady looked at each other and jumped into the wagon: what have you had and lost, girl? And they too clung to the dead man's trousers, under the leather belt groping and sniggering. Then they cried out in one voice the crying of truth: Oh, Mary, I curse you: what have you had that I did not know.
(Translated by Andreea-Iulia Ciucă / 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. 
