I used to have a bowl cut, with a face like a full moon, a snub nose and my knees forever scratched. For my
pop-pop I was squirrel. For nana, a hellish kid. For the downstairs neighbour who always gave me Germa gum I was the chocolate girl. One day I lost my teeth, my hair grew and I started wearing glasses. The days grew shorter. The snow stopped bringing me joy. All my guardian angels left my side. In Beijing, a little boy with
coffee-brown eyes called me Aunty.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
