Grandma loved pickles so much. Well, that was all she could eat, without dentures. She said that when she died, she would watch us from above, how we gorged ourselves on pickles. I pleased the old witch, for she was also rather poor-sighted and maybe up there where she had gone to make pickles with the angels, who knows if they had strong glasses; so I kept her between the jars with the green tomatoes, in brine, in a barrel for cabbage and I cut out a door for her right next to her face, we open it when we don't have guests, so that they don't die with fright.
(Translated by Medeea Alexandra Stan / 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. 
