I'm lucky. His eyes are already closed. Wrinkled eyelids cover his eyes, once blue, now a washed-out beige. I would have been so cold and so afraid to touch her small, wrinkled face, seemingly framed by wrinkles. I've known him since he came into the world, watched him grow up, around the house, chased him when he was little. He was so dear to me. For five minutes I've been trying to touch him. I can't. I pour myself a glass of brandy. I sip it. I swallow. I open my eyes. I add 2 carrots, put the lid on and set the timer for 30 minutes.
(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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
