A good day for him was when he wasn't hurting at all. Or when he could drink water without help. Fewer and fewer of those days lately. He was close to the last stage, but refused any hospitalization. Live as long as you can, he said, that's not living. In the mornings a very polite young woman came and walked him around the block on her arm. On Sundays, his feast day, they would drive him to her grave and leave him there alone for half an hour. On Sundays, he didn't hurt anymore. He was like a soldier, visiting home.
(Translated by Andreea-Iulia Ciucă / 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. 
