Cici had been struggling for a year now. In the mirror before her over 100 kilos of skin spilled over, just about ready to burst under the pressure of the fat underneath, generously covering her arms, torso, thighs and neck. Rubens himself would have been horrified. She had given up bread, no longer knew the taste of chocolate, and she'd organized a ceremony saying goodbye to potatoes and pasta more than a year ago.
The only pleasure she had left every evening were the five harmless bags of little puffed corn balls, coated in a generous amount of salt. 475 calories a bag.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
