And then I don't know if I still remember, brother Iftimie. But these three have got my soul like Simon's fish in the Net. The day my mother took me to my first communion, she said to me, "My child, make a monastery out of the forest to which you may pray, honour the sun like you would Christ, and pray to the sky and heaven for rain, so as to water your animals." And you'll have plenty on your table and in your heart. Well, Petre, what use are all of these, if your wife died? But what fault have the forest, the sun and the sky, brother Iftimie? And he downed another drink to ease the pain.
(Translated by Alina-Dorina Nicolae / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
