She hurried past everything. The woman knew that life is not a gift, but a flight from nothing to anything. If only she had stopped to have time to comb the long curls and braid the pigtails of the child she had marked as a witness of helplessness. Guilt gnaws at her guts, just as she had so many times when she picked up the scissors and chose not to waste an hour braiding pigtails. Now she makes wreaths from the minutes of a present sleep and from the twigs fallen on the grave.
(Translated by Andreea-Alexandra Șerbănescu / 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. 
