Your son has a quite serious early onset myopia. Yes, I've presumed, the mother sighed and the doctor seemed that sorrow cast a light on her even brighter. We have a small family business, in fact, he does all the work, but since his eye problem, we had many complaints.
He is just a child, Madame, how is possible that you put him to work? the doctor said and looked at the boy who twiddled unamused with the string of a small bow.
I raise him by myself, what can I do.
The doctor stared in her big eyes, heard a short flapping and felt a sting in his heart.
(Translated by Ana Maria Adriana Oprea / 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 March 2021, the group has 4.300 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. 
