If only you had waited for me, if only I had been able to find you once more... You've been ambitious your entire life: when you told me to give up sports as well as when you forced me to give up guitar. All that so I can go to college, become an engineer, surpass your vocational school condition. In the waves of life, you were always my buoy. You always stopped me when I wanted to fly. You broke my wings, mom. And you didn't even stay for one morehour for us to say our goodbyes. You left before I got there. The nurses had covered your face. And I signed the papers.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / 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 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. 
