There was a dowry chest, located in the best room from grandmother's house. It was locked with a key. I asked her what precious thing she was keeping in there and I asked her if when she died she would give me the key. Grandmother smiled and continued her work, baking cakes, scolding the flies that werestaining her windows. My grandmother died at 91 years old. I was already an adult, I had children and a job. She left me the key to the dowry chest: her wedding dress, a blouse of homespun, a flowered headscarf, and some photographs, one of me as a child.
(Translated by Roberta Ana-Maria Gulerez / 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. 
