Between a bell ring and a cigarette smoke lay hidden her dark thoughts. She hadn't received a letter from him in two weeks. In the last one he'd promised her that they would make a home together, that they would have the most beautiful kids and that they would spend their nights at the lake feeding the swans. He was 27 years old and never left this boring town. They grew up together and he left to get his degree in the Capital. Someone was knocking on the door. Silence. She opened. It was the mailman. And beside him the priest.
(Translated by Maria Cătălina Moisescu / 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. 
