That was her stage name. She had come to the capital with big dreams and long legs. She saw herself in sparkling outfits, wooed, like those girls on TV. Lured by cheap colourful dupery, she quit school and got on the double-decker train at the first stop she encountered. Thrown into the world of sex for money in a dive on the outskirts, knocked up and penniless, she wished she had stayed at home with her mum. Nobody had told her that being leggy and having golden curls doesn't make you an artist.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
