Once a month, old Vanca put on her walking shoes and left for the market. She left at dawn from up the hill of the village where she lived and only stopped at the Blind Man's Fountain to drink some water. She arrived at the market alongside the merchants, she knew all of them, because time passed quicker when they were talking with each other. She didn't sell much, some eggs and a bunch of who knows what green plants. If you saw her passing slowly through chamomile bushes you would think she was Saint Sunday. Back home, she softened the indelible pencil on her tongue and wrote the news down on her notebook on three columns.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / 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 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. 
