With a lost, incoherent look, with an old overcoat, a hat with a loose brim and a pair of tattered galoshes, she caught the eyes of passers-by. I don't know where she came from, where she lived, and I personally left her food and sometimes pennies every day. I didn't know my mother and I would have taken the street woman home. On the eve when I went down to invite her to the table, I froze. She was lying on the ground, dying. I picked her up like a flake and she said faintly: all my life I've loved you. She clutched a picture dearly to her chest. It was me, as a baby.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Mușetescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
