that you'd come and get me from the front of the store, if I brought enough money home. So I saved and saved, mother. I even sold the wafers I received, and the pretzels, only to bring you the money. But I couldn't survive the cold and the hunger, mother. Forgive-me. A few days later I bought myself some crackers. I didn't tell them your name, nor your address. The years passed by, and I still have the napkin with coins. I open it from time to time to soothe my longing. But I'll give them to the kids that beg at the corner of the street. Maybe they won't lose their mothers.
(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. 
