The woman is lying on the table. Wildflowers spill from nostrils long since emptied of breath. Mud from the spring rains still shows on her soles. Under her fingernails the damp earth shelters snails with dilapidated houses. A ladybug and a spider walk shamelessly across the bare skin, starting from the left shoulder to the barren belly. The professor pours a glass of wine on the floor and says a short prayer. Then he raises the scalpel and addresses the students: today we will study a wounded heart.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / 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. 
