They found her after the earthquake, among the wreckage. She was wearing a long tulle dress and her hair was tied up into a flawless bun. She had opened her elegant parasol and, while sitting on a leather suitcase, she was humming an aria. The firefighter asked her: was there anyone else in the house, ma'am? She looked at him with an absent, sad expression on her face and said: no one lives here anymore. He did not manage to find out her name or age. At the hospital, the nurses were not surprised by her bizarre outfit, but the sheet of paper attached to the bedhead read: Jane Doe, place of residence: unknown.
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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. 
