In my day, women were women, not like today. They used to wear heels, silk socks and hats with fascinators, they used to speak in a low voice and enter the room where men smoke cigars only to bring their coffees. Oh, you're one of those fetishists. I only remember women who walked barefoot, with hands full of blisters. They had only one set of good clothes to wear in church on Sundays, they used to wash their clothes in the river and beat them with a mallet. But I've seen no man recalling the mallet with tenderness.
(Translated by Ioana Busuioc / 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 January 2022, the group has 7.830 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. 
