The magnificence of that spring morning cut your heart slowly, as if by a knife elegantly wielded by hands that were opening an envelope. You were running towards the hospital, under the mirabelle trees, snowing with petals. You wanted to see her before she went into surgery. She was waiting for you in the salon, as white as the shaken off flowers. You told her the stupidest of jokes and then you snuggled for a while. Not as much as you wanted to. When the operation room doors closed and you didn't see your Mother anymore, the earth suddenly sank into the deepest of nights.
(Translated by Tania Diniță / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
