She looks like me. She has the same thin fingers and her eyes are small when she laughs. She likes the sea, not the mountains. Coffee, not tea. She looks like me. Her lower lip trembles when she cries and her breathing is shallow when she gets angry. She looks like me. She has curly hair, a snub nose. She doesn't know how to dance, but she dances as if there was nothing left in the world. Today she is 18 years old. For as long as that, I've wanted to tell her that she's not mine. That her mother put her in my arms and never came back. But how do I tell her that? She looks like me.
(Translated by Claudia Alexandra Văcărescu / 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 April 2021, the group has 5.600 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
