The old man was chewing his thoughts with a wrinkled wooden spoon and was sighing at the thought of his granddaughter who promised she would come that afternoon. He had dreamed a few nights ago that he would die and he'd wanted to say goodbye earlier and tell her the secret he had kept hidden behind his thoughts. He had reached 94 and felt that it was the moment. His daughter died while giving birth to his granddaughter, taken by the Shadows. Ioana was grown-up now and stronger than any curse. The doorbell rang when he took the last sip.
(Translated by Mara-Sabina Rolea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
