My mother had to shorten my ruffled dress quickly for the school fair. She needed some needles, so she took the ones that fixed the butterflies in the insectarium for which I got a 10 in Biology. I was on the stage, reciting the poem with my tears lying between my eyelashes. In the second line, my mother was crying; my father was filming me. The public was fascinated by my performance. No one knew I had a needle stuck in my skin. When I got home, my insectarium was empty; the butterflies disappeared. My cat was licking her muzzle.
(Translated by Roberta Maria Gulerez / 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 June 2021, the group has 6.650 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. 
