Marița feared that she wouldn't find a man to get married so she took fear by the hand and walked to the fountain at the crossroad. Old Safta told her that she would meet her Promised One after midnight of that night. She looked around in the pitch darkness then she held her breath and listened. No one was close by. She gathered up courage and let her expectations loose, then she bended over and looked at the fountain's water like in a mirror. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the face of a girl. She spat on her breast, did the sign of the cross and cursed the old woman with passion under her breath.
(Translated by Alin Sescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected 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. 
