He will activate it for me after baccalaureate, says Emil while is trying on, maybe for the last time, my dresses. Excuse me? My parents say that I will be normal. In the following years I kept asking me, what moment in time should have been wished normal? Today, Emil is not wearing dresses anymore but is sewing them with the rejected needle and rainbow threads. The Paris is always clapping. The heart of a woman can shatter two brains of a man, because we are born, and we die in our own recovery. What a hilarious species we are. A mask intended for normality covers an abyss.
(Translated by Beatrice-Ioana Huruială / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
