She sleeps with her thumb in her mouth in the crib above which the planets revolve slowly. In the morning she gets up idly from the sheets and goes into the bathroom grumpily, with ruffled hair and two pimples on her face. When she goes out, she wears her skinny jeans and pink tank top. She stops in the kitchen, where her husband awaits with a steamy coffee. The two kids immediately rush in and they're quickly given their school meals. She works from home until late because she's left alone: her husband got ill and the children left the country after their masters degrees.
(Translated by Alexandra Lica / 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 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. 
