There was this thought that had been keeping her buzzed for some time - she longed for an expensive hat, one that was meant for madams, like the ones that were looked upon in envy on the way to fair, when she was going there to sell milk. Marita had better not say anything to me, she wore in her thoughts, when she watered the milk down and then sold it in the fair, for I will have the hat! After a month she was wearing the hat proudly, but the damned wind snatched it from her right on the bridge. Before she had lost sight of her lacing that was floating on the water as a dally following the flowers, Marita threw them behind out of spite: you came floating on the water and you go back floating on it as well.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
