I was breathlessly eating the cherries out of the sour cherry liqueur. Us under the table, our parents cheerfully around it. I was eating the whole cherries, my friend was stuffing the pits up her nose. It was dark, she was mumbling something unintelligible. In the beam of light I see her misshapen face, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging out of their sockets. We go out. Screams of horror. The doctor let me see what was about to happen to her, to teach me a lesson. I laughed and I counted the pits pulled with a bent wire out of the bulging sinus of my friend who smiled lethargically. Turmoiled just like me.
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / 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. 
