You won't ever shine, little girl. You are poor, and your gum flip-flops will only ever touch urine-filled floors and dark stairs and will keep you captive so that you won't be able to fly any higher than a broomstick. The curse was unfolding rapidly in the dark, like a creature mutilated by its own birth. The sky may have been widowed of stars in the mud that kept her swaddled, but Ursa Major was meant to appear, without its cub, to carry her far away, to the ball dance, where she would have waltzed in high-heeled shoes made of glass.
(Translated by Bianca-Andreea Rîmboacă / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
