I hated having short hair and a headband without pom poms. All the girls in my class had huge, pressed hydrangeas on their headbands, as if they'd come to a contest of displaying bows and ribbons. I also had a small one made of bandages, tied to the stitches on my forehead, which squeezed the dent made by the iron swing. The chair was full of multi-coloured flower arrangements in fancy boxes, of which the teacher was very proud. I happily gave her three gladioli which I later saw in the dustbin among the carnations and marigolds.
(Translated by Adrian-George Ilinca / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
