Each baby was born with a tattoo at the base of the neck or on the forehead, between the eyebrows. The symbol was a message decipherable only by their parents, after performing some rituals with kykeon. Thus the ties with the dead in each clan were renewed. When the first baby without tattoos was born, the parents were arrested, and the baby was killed by burning. When the number of newborns with silent skin began to grow, it was declared a state of global emergency. Genocide was the only way to save the species.
(Translated by Ecaterina Buşe / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
