She laid the table for twelve people (maybe he doesn't come alone this year) and matched three plates, overlapping, next to each chair. The darkness falls quickly, it is time to dress, then close the brooch in which the moon stone blinks pale. She brings the golden plates one by one: The fat calf, the milk piglets, the fish of the seas. Follow the wine decanter. Now she will wait. Carolers bypass the door, there is no one here, there lived, in the old days, a woman who, until death, waited for her son to return.
(Translated by Laura-Elena Dobrin / 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. 
