Most of them went to gipsy fortune tellers when in trouble, and Sidonia was, by far, everyone's favorite. She was smart enough to trick them. No one knew how she managed to lure them in for they gathered around her like fish around food. Today Mara came from the big town. She'd spend big money. It'd been a summer since she'd stepped into this yard to have her fortune told. She shook off her bracelets, spat in her blouse for good luck, and greeted her with a: Come in, love, bless your heart like a rose! In the shed, the bumbling doll was hanging treacherously.
(Translated by Liliana Popescu / 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. 
