Help me out, sweetheart. Here's one leu. I'm ill and I have nobody. Alright, granny, here's two. My heart hurts, I've got a numb leg. There, three. I can only see with one eye. Uff, take 5. And the other one's foggy. Oh god. My ankle's sprained. Oh. With a torn ligament. Here's 10 more. Diabetes. Parkinson's. Breast cancer, ovarian cysts, cholecystitis. 30. Discopathy, muscular dystrophy, encephalitis. 50. Anthrax, acne. Done. You won. Here, take all the money. And the wallet, too. It's a gift.
(Translated by Ioana Grigoruță / 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.