Eleven fingers on one hand

Every night she'd press all her 22 fingers together and would pray for her younger sister, Ana. She loved her more than anything else and more than ever, especially because she was special. She prayed for her to stop coming from school in tears, to stop cursing the classmates that were laughing at her, and for her to be accepted as she was and as she deserved. Ana would be sitting in her corner, playing with her favorite doll. She had broken six fingers from each of its hands so that she could have a friend like herself, even if it was made out of plastic.

(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.