There comes a day when you can't anymore. It's not a bad day. It's The Day. It's a bad weight on your chest and you know what that claw is. You don't wait. You put on your black dress, your fishnet stockings and your veil. You put on your lipstick. You want to make a good impression. You don't have heels, you threw them away when you had your radial head fracture. You go barefoot and feel sexy. You climb up on the banister, close your eyes and in front of the block you're still on the pavement. You get up and walk. At the traffic lights you pass through cars, and the drivers say to themselves: what a strange wind has suddenly arisen.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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. 
