I don't want a pink hat, I want to play football. I don't care that only boys play football, that's what I like, just leave me alone. No, this flowered dress sticks to the wounds on my knees and it hurts. If you keep braiding my hair, I'll throw the ball in your window and shatter it. She sighed deeply, crouched in the grass and started sobbing. The tears seemed to take her into a world where she didn't feel lonely, where she belonged. A home where nobody wanted to change her and where everyone was accepted.
(Translated by Alina-Mihaela Burciu / 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. 
