I had met her when I was 4 years old. Right after I blew the candles on my birthday cake, I started to tremble, I turned white as a ghost, I was breathing heavily and sweat was running down my face. She was my luck. She had saved me. As she would for the rest of my life. Every time I was dragged into the pearly rust of the disease, she was there, like an oxalic acid, to save me. The scabies of sadness cornered me in old age. Even now when I want to commit suicide, the insulin syringe looks at me sympathetically from the nightstand.
(Translated by Claudia Alexandra Văcărescu / 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. 
