Rumour was she has been living on that land for thousands of years. She has a secret, the old women gossiped. But what secret did she hide? No one knew neither why she did not get into the round dance, nor why she did not have a fight with the other villagers. She would walk alone into the woods in the vicinity and would drink water from the rivers. One day, they sent the madman of the village to follow her, but he did not come back. Or perhaps, as some villagers would say, he returned deaf and blind. Now no one follows her around. When they rarely see her on the lane, everyone imagines she is a ghost.
(Translated by Roberta Ana-Maria Gulerez / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
