When I look into the mirror, I look deep into my eyes and ask myself: girl, are you okay? Yeah. Look, you have two white hairs, but you still can't see that your hair is going white. Come on, for an aunt in her almost 40s, you look pretty good. Now is your time. You can play all the roles you rehearsed in college: moms, nannies, aunts. Just hurry up a little. After 10 years of maternity leave, if the pandemic lasts another 10 years, you will only play old hags. Communist old hags. For something else, your face won't help much.
(Translated by Carol Popa Zafiriadi / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 October 2021, the group has 7.275 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. 
