Luigi stood next to the coffin they chose together after receiving the diagnosis. Half a century of waking up next to her will turn tomorrow into a handful of years of talking to the walls of this huge house he's afraid to enter. A wife, two children, three grandchildren, four pieces of candy on a candy bar, five red fingernails on each hand, six pearls around his neck, seven degrees body temperature. Luigi stopped counting and asked the only question worthy of the moment: where did you go, Maria? But Maria said nothing more.
(Translated by Andreea-Iulia Ciucă / 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. 
