Why didn't anyone tell me, warn me that loving a child is sometimes harder than carrying you back for miles? Why do they all talk to me about pacifiers and pink moments, roles and blessings, maternal instincts with the scent of Snow White, springing from a sleep more eternal than death? Why are you forcibly pouring into my eardrums stories about the famous cup of water brought as a pouch in old age? My reality is a bubble of side effects over your reality. I hold my baby in my arms and cry.
(Translated by Medeea Alexandra Stan / 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
