Open your eyes. Uh, you're gonna be late again. Put on your skirt and your
patched-up shirt. Both are small and barely cover your puny
long-legged body. How I wish I had some new clothes. Her dad lies in front of the door, a trail of blood on his bald head. He got in a fight, tonight he's gonna beat me again. She pushes him with disgust. She gets out. Her eyes are filled with light. A man walks past her. He doesn't have the face of a drunkard. If only her father would be like that. The man smiles to her. She smiles back and hopes tomorrow will be different. She hears the birds singing and the man shouting: whore.
(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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
