You make a doll out of rags, fill it with feathers, write his name on it and, every time he upsets you, you stick a needle in it, and where you stick the needle in the doll, it hurts him, said Paraschiva, the neighbour, whispering, while Filomela was knitting socks and listening to her, worried. Suddenly, the door slammed against the wall and Artemie, Filomela's husband, entered, cursing and rushing at her, so that the poor woman jumped and barely managed to defend herself by stabbing him with a needle. Do I have time for dolls, Paraschiva? Paraschiva was running away.
(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. 
