When they ask me if I have my mother's eyes, I proudly say yes. Now I have them in a jar. She'd beaten me up for years for either being naughty or having a nasty look. I was a child. Foolish sometimes, but a child. I'd inherited her blue eyes and long eyelashes, I was her flesh and blood. And she hit. And hit. After a while I couldn't feel it anymore, I thought of sweets and cheerful mothers. And she hit. But I grew up. Her heavy hand fell silent. The body is under those roses she always loved and said they were her children. But the eyes are mine. Mine.
(Translated by Lenuţa Bejenaru / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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. 
