I wake up at 2 A.M. I'm bleeding. I stroke her, as usual, to feel her little hands crushing my skin. She wouldn't move. 911. A dress pulled over my shoulders. Stretcher. Ambulance. He's up front, praying. I hold a young man by the hand, he reassures me. 2 minutes. Someone is checking her heartbeat. She's still alive. They're injecting me in the back. We are surrounded by an army. 2 minutes. It hurts. The injection does not work. 4 minutes. I feel the scalpel and cry. Two hands lifted her into the air. She's perfect. We cry. We laugh. We love.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Ilie / 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. 
