One day, my mother disappeared. I thought she hid in the cookbook, the one she looked through every night in order to prepare us breakfast, lunch and dinner. She wasn't there. I also searched for her in the laundry pile, couldn't find her. I knew she always taped the grocery list on the fridge door. In its place, I found a drawing I made years ago. Me, her, dad. Mom was smiling. She was dreaming. She was still dreaming then that there was a world in which she was more than useful to us. I think that's where she's hiding now.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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. 
