I left with my uniform on, nothing else, just belt stripes on my face. It was raining and I entered a milliner's shop, warm from the steam of the iron. I hid under a little pink hat and stayed under it for about ten years, nobody missed me, but when I came back they called me strange, that I was walking around with a roll of felt under my arm. I was making fancy hats and imagining, not selling them. I would get under them and disappear. With the brown hat I had a surprise, when I came back from it I was in a kitchen washing dishes.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
