My face is a story inked on skin. At night, I let my fingers wander over wrinkles and recount my life: I - a child hanging in a cherry tree, I - a rebel running away from home by train, I - a student with falling grades in linguistics, I - a woman searching for the absolute truth, I - a warrior in the name of love, I - lost in the labyrinth inside myself. In the morning, I wash the story off my face, cover carefully all of the wrinkles and imperfections, and become Sleeping Beauty once again. I wish that, just for once, the clock would stop ticking forever.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
