You know, I couldn't have children. I never knew what it was like, to have a life growing beneath your flesh. To feel that your body is full. When they told me I was sick I laughed and I thought I would get over it. This time last year I was a month away from discovering I didn't have long to live. Since they started giving me morphine I've been thinking about how I now host bits of life inside me. I have
twenty-four children, that's what I call my metastases. Don't be sad, soon I will be born again. Look, milk flows from my cut breast.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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 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. 
