Eleven fingers on one hand

She had run out of curses for the people that she was passing by. She had got bored of repeating them. She had used swear words about the dead, about genitals and she had already called them all sorts of names. She decided to access the online dictionary in order to learn new words. Stutterer, dunderhead, giddy, wimp, twisted. Can't you see that you're a nincompoop? Rascal, self-centered, stupid, dumb, foolish, stiff, cheater? She had even considered doing a finger transplant in order to have more middle fingers.

(Translated by Alma Teodora Miron / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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.