In the silence of the night, I check to see if she's still breathing. She smiles babyishly and holds her little hands above her head. Keep calm, you will have thousands of reasons to worry about from now on. Did she gain enough weight? Colic, the first tooth, diversification. Why does she not touch the vegetables? How long does it take until she gives up pampers? Are all the children always seek, or is it just mine that gathers all the crocodiles? Where am I doing something wrong? Nowhere, she seems to be whispering to me. You're just learning to be a mother.
(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. 
