Her body has been telling her for quite some time that's enough. Her fingertips were always cut and rough, that foot blade of the leg she used to step on the pedal let her know about weather changes by hurting her whenever she would put pressure on it. Her back was always hunched and the glasses with thicker and thicker lenses never ceased to leave marks on her nose. The trends had come and gone, the cool things never stuck by for too long. It was just her and her Singer car she got through leasing. She will get herself a suit with her first pension just to have it around for when she's gonna retire for good.
(Translated by Carol Popa Zafiriadi / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 March 2022, the group has 8,050 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. 
