I was on my second jump out of the tree. Floarea found me bleeding again. She screamed at me, and scolded and cursed me with every word she knew. I cried because I already had two and that was enough. The third time I gave birth to a deaf-mute and couldn't cry anymore. Later I would discover he had cancer, and again I couldn't cry. Trouble and yet more trouble was to test me. I wanted to shed tears upon tears. I couldn't cry over any of them. At this hour, I pray that my man will not die before me. What will people say when they see that I can't mourn him?
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Marinescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
