After the gravediggers left, someone put their hand on my shoulder and told me to stop, in a month you'll be better. Despite the whiff of brandy left behind, he was the only one who showed me a light. But then every night came with the same dream where I stop ironing, look out the window in time and manage to pull him out of the water, take him in my arms, kiss him, make him breathe. He is alive. Thirty more mornings have already killed him. If I don't stop time, my baby will die because of me endlessly. Goodbye.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / 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. 
