Here I am again at your bedside. I have loved you all in my life, and I stayed with none of you. I saw Maricica on the street corner every morning. My God, how my heart leapt. So I took her home. She liked it in the light, but one time the sun hit her too hard on the head, and off she went. Beti, poor thing, got ripped apart by Fluffy. By the time we got home, it was too late. Every night I weep for you with bitterness and longing, I wet your earth with my tears. Come on, Joan, you're boiling plants again?
(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. 
