There were only the two of them left, and every day was a cry from the back of life, because they were too old to want more. Lup was gone, and the garden was full of weeds. There was more darkness in their hearts. That is, until one day, when John knocked on their gate and asked for work. They accepted serenely. At first he fixed their fence, then a light bulb, then a joke. To think that many considered him the village madman. They looked upon him as a son, and in the end he became the light of their souls.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
