I'm a tattoo artist. I draw people's destinies on their bodies. But something discreet, you know, a real artist is not ostentatious. A mole, a wrinkle, stuff like that. My favourites are invisible ink tattoos. How sweet people, they walk quietly, while I admire my work from a distance. Look, this one has a dream tattooed on his eyelids. To the other, I imprinted on the atria and ventricles an unrequited love. The brains are the most interesting, what lacework, what arabesques they can draw. What's your job?
(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. 
