Eleven fingers on one hand

Did she love him? Of course she did. Where could she find another to serenade her happy birthday by the racing engines of - how many could they have been? - 15 bikes! Who else to tongue-write poems on her bare skin, under her cream-colored dress? She touched her bruise again, put her sunglasses on and entered the elevator. Wow, new look, remarked her colleagues. She smiled at them and sighed. He was like that, heavy-handed, both when touching her hips and when hitting her. 11-finger handed, you'd say.

(Translated by Eleonora Manea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Professor Nadina Vişan)


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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.