I used to be so beautiful. There were so many hands that touched me and so many eyes that longed for me. My fresh smell gave any room a noble scent. Then, my face started withering, the thrilling feelings inside me grew stale, so only an old friend was touching me lovingly, asking himself why did I isolate myself after the blockbuster film that brought me extra notoriety. This morning, a young man spotted me by a dumpster stacked with some others like me and gave me another chance.
(Translated by Liliana Popescu / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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. 
