It is summer. I put water from the well in a tin valve and then let it warm in the sun. In the evening, I go to the garden barefoot, I take off my dress, my panties, I release my hair from my tail and then I immerse myself in the warm water. The hens are squawking, the cat is meowing, the grandmother is spinning the polenta, the grandfather is driving a nail into a shed. The crickets start singing symphonies to me. I put my whole head in the water and it's quiet. Through a hole in the fence, the neighbor's boy looks at me. He doesn't know my name. But he knows how to call me.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Mușetescu / 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. 
