Mine hurts anywhere you'd touch it, she said to me. You'd better wait. It'll never change, she said. Don't try. It can't give more, and it won't, she said. Don't ask this of me. Sometimes it's open, sometimes it's shut, she said. It doesn't beat. For a long time, I gently blew air around it. There was no time for us to talk about something else. One day, mine broke, without any aura. I handed it to her, crying. Oh, it's ugly, she said. It can't change anymore. It hurts anywhere you'd touch it, she said. It's too late, it beats but it's crippled. It's too heavy for me, she said. Take it back. Your heart.
(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. 
