She was brilliantly painting half women holding some half a baby and having half a tear on her cheek and half a smile on her face. A complete artist, the critics claimed, the collectors were buying the hell out of her paintings, no one cared that her exhibitions were always happening on the 13
th of December. When Sister Benedikta found her wrapped in half a quilt at the abbey's gates, whimpering of hunger for life, 30 winters ago, it was on a 13
th day, on Saint Ottilia's day. She smiled bitterly. Complete artist, half a person.
(Translated by Andreea Denisa Dinu / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
