It's raining softly outside. You rummage through the trash among food scraps, broken dishes, broken toys. I see a box with a pink bow. I untie the bow, open the box; in it, a perfume. I spray it on the neck. I don't know if I'm Geta or Cinderella anymore, because I'm starting to change. New clothes appear on me, my hair curls; I have different shoes on my feet. I float above the world, smelling of wildflowers. Then I trip over a cloud and fall out of my dream straight into my poverty. It's raining softly outside. I get out of the shack and run to the garbage.
(Translated by Andreea Laura Stanca / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected 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. 
