Each day was a gift to my mother, partially lost in a world of her own, in a fancy clinic. I would go daily to see her, to absorb at least 5 minutes of her coming back to us, suppose we're the rational ones in this endless routine. After a couple of months, my duty no longer allowed me to reach mom when she was asking for me. A few hours later, after an apocalyptic phone call, I got there when she was almost as warm and beautiful as I had never seen her in my youth, serene and bright. I hadn't been there then.
(Translated by Adelina-Maria Mănăilescu / 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 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. 
