After a while she didn't miss them anymore. She started to forget their faces. And so, their voices faded a long time ago. Sometimes she watched the blue mass, but she no longer wished to wander towards its end. While the whole thing lasted, she had lost five layers of skin. Now she knew her body had been a prison. Every piece of fallen meat was healing fast, elastic and young like a gazelle's skin. One day, she will shed it, as a map given to the sailors. On Leper Island being shipwrecked was a blessing.
(Translated by Ioana Busuioc / 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 February 2023, the group has 10,500 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. 
