When she gave me to the tanner, my mother told me: a man should only know you from the waist down. After the first month I thought I'd die. After the first year I thought I'd miscarry. The smell of leather had stuck to my belly, and he smelled like an animal in heat at night. He never looked at me and I thought my mother had told him the same thing. Then the drought came. People brought even more animal skins to cure. He brought me along to learn. How to scrape, cut and dry it with salt. I soaked and washed fur for the first time. There was fire in his eyes that night, when he whispered: now you're truly my woman.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Ciucașu / 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. 
