She got out of the consulting room, as white as a sheet. How the hell could it be cancer? Who gets cancer in their 20s? No, no, she wanted more tests, fingering, x-rays, scans. She went weak at the knees and searched for a chair to sit. All around, only the cheap kind bought from Decathlon. She placed herself next to one of those and burst out laughing hysterically. The nurses asked her if she was ok. Ha. Ha. Ha. They are unbelievable. How the hell could it be cancer, when they don\'t have the means to buy some chairs, let alone identify an incurable disease? Ha. Ha. Ha.
(Translated by Andra Daiana Păuna / 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 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.
