In my mother's garden, autumn comes late, and the flowers breathe until late winter. There's an old walnut tree whose leaves used to color my hair when I was a kid. In my mother's garden, I can still feel my grandparents and I'm always craving pumpkin pie and new wine. I still dance and write stories till daylight. Unfortunately, my mother's garden cannot travel from here to there, because there is here, where I'm no longer a kid. I am a mother and I make neither pies nor new wine, and the walnut tree has been replaced by a magnolia.
(Translated by Ioana Busuioc / 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 February 2023, the group has 10,500 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. 
