After the war, poverty was their mother, and hunger dragged its ripped shoes through the dust of the village alleys. The thick sun streamed across the empty fields. A handful of cornmeal was a joy, but a handful of white flour meant a life of luxury. My mother leaves for food, because today she has nothing left to put on the table. She doesn't even dream of a litre of sunflower oil. It would be like old times again, when the corn, wheat and flower fields combed through the sun's gleaming teeth. The laughter of all the children grows louder.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
