She loved him in secret. She dreamt of sewing him a mantle or something with her own hand, to cover his nakedness. She smashed the clay moneybox and counted the coins excitedly. It would've been better if she had eaten less toffees, she thought, but there was no time for regrets now. She went through the fair looking for the reddest silk and bought a cubit of fabric brought straight from China. She sewed all night, with trembling hands. At first light she sneaked around the sleeping guard and that was it. Now her David had a red
heart-shaped patch on his chest.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Denisa Neagu / 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
