I was coming home from high school, back when I was a teenager. I found a little girl on the stairs, she was 7 or 8 years old, she was stroking a doll. She wasn't one of the neighbors' kids, I knew them all. The doll had a porcelain head and a rag body. You know, with that specific Asian makeup. "What's your name?" I ask her. "Monica", she answers. "What are you doing here?" "She's tired, I want to put her to sleep." "What's her name?" "Look, she has a locket on her wrist, her name is Madenchina." "Do you love her?" "Yes, she's my little sister."
(Translated by Andreea-Simona Trufin / 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. 
