She only had two sets of clothes, her church ones and those she'd worn the last time she'd seen him. Her left eye twitched all day and when her man told her he would sail farther so he would find more fish, the child in her belly twitched once, too. Don't go right now, she asked him, only to hear him laugh at her dumb fear. He grabbed her, kissed her passionately and was gone. She never forgave him, not even now, as she sits on the veranda and gazes at the straw man in the cherry tree, dressed in church clothes.
(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. 
