Ana smiles fondly deep in her thoughts, for Sicily has become a second home. It all started with Mario, whom she looked after for almost six years. She managed to pay her bank installments and ate calamari for the first time; it had been both tough and nice. Luigi was a count, a well-mannered poet, through whom she discovered Leopardi. She lived for 7 years in that house with the crystal chandelier, the antique piano,and the orchard full of lemons and pomegranates. She helped her children buy their houses, saw Mount Etna, and got her driver's license.
La vita è bella.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
