The short woman, struggling to clasp her hands over her stomach, with a frightened look on her face and an overwhelmed expression, tries to process the ICU doctor's words. Haemorrhage, vomiting, withdrawal, anxiolytics. It's too much. All she knows is that her husband had a nose bleed. Her shoulders dropped when the doctor went back behind the sealed door that seemed to lead to another world. I try to comfort her, doctors are kind and caring. She lifts up her shoulders and lets them fall again. He wants to go home. He only liked to drink beer.
(Translated by Raluca Ioana Crucerescu / 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. 
