Pick a number the mocking laugh could be heard from a distance. Even if he wanted to he wouldn't have been able to reply, and not only because the dry crust of blood, tears, phlegm and piss keeping his lips ties together made it impossible to move them, but because he knew that anything he would choose would come back around against him as always, and not so much because he got tired of being cut, jerked around, spat at and peed on, but because from the inside of the crust the only thing that could be heard was the voice of the girl from so long ago and her playful laugh:
Pick a number.
(Translated by Diana Pașcanu / 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.
