She was ready to blow out the candles on the cake. She filled her lungs with air and blowed lightly towards the six flames dancing as if drunk from the smell of chlorine, rubbing alcohol and hospital soup. "Mom, if you blow them out for me, will my wish come true?", the little girl asked. "Of course, God knows you're tired." "Your heart is like a pair of tap red shoes", the doctor had explained to her, "it moves too fast." So, she wished for another pair on her birthday. She received ballet shoes instead, got
en pointe and danced suavely towards the sky.
(Translated by Ruxandra Ioana Vasile / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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. 
