I don't want to go to school, mom. That's what she used to tell her every day, but mom wouldn't hear her. And today mom ignored her even more and pushed her to get into the car faster because she had an exam, she had to study, to pass it. If mom had asked why just once, maybe now she wouldn't be punching her battered face, crumpling the goodbye note and howling helplessly. Her schoolmates had been humiliating or shunning her for so long, and she had suffered for each one for a long time, slowly dying, until she'd decided to end the story.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
