When my mom was in her uterus, just four months old, I was there too, half of a seed of life. We were all sitting one into another, like some matryoshka dolls. Life goes on, child. Knead it well. Grams, did you notice I already got white strands of hair? The brioches were rising in the tiny, warm kitchen. Want some rakia? Yes, darling. You can still see the nicks from when I carved my name on the wall with a knife. I roughed you up a little. We laugh and sit, like two old bags, next to the furnace. Three old bags, one smaller than the other.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
