Last year I helped an elderly lady carry her groceries home. From the market to the staircase of her apartment block, I entered her world step by step, starting from her childhood and ending with the operated phalanges that prevent her from lifting weights. She asked me to save her son's number on a piece of paper in her diary, for fear of losing it. Yesterday, for my birthday, she gave me a packet of coffee and an apple cake. Surprised, I wanted to thank her, but I didn't know her name. I found out. Aunt Ana.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / 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. 
