His lips smelled like sulphur and the hands which rubbed against her had a scent of homemade soap. His breath reeked of iron fillings from the gates of hell. She was pale and sleepless while screaming her pain rhythmically under his whip every night. Screaming was useless. He was spreading her salty eyeliner with his gummy fingers. His tongue covered in saliva was finding its way through her hated-glued teeth. Forgive me and free me from this livid torment. How funny, said Longing. You anchored me by the heart and tied me up to your numbered days.
(Translated by Alin Sescu / 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 July 2022, the group has 8,750 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. 
