75 years old and two years since he crossed over. To the other side. Their son has settled down, their grown-up grandchildren rarely come visit her. The jars are full of goodies, but the joys are packed in boxes with nolid, no labels on, no destination. Days go by just the same. She has kept everything. With one exception. The paintings. The empty frames are hanging on the same walls. She looks at them and sees different people every day. Different moments. Different lives. The loneliness of the smallest possible life that she has left leads her down the corridors to her great escape.
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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 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. 
