When I was young, my mother took methyl blue pills to calm her throat and when I asked her why her tongue was blue, she said she licked the sky to put the clouds aside, and remained a little blue on my tongue, and all the sunny days I thanked her that the sun saw me because of her. The last time she took the pills, I found the empty box staring into the mirror on the bedside table and a pair of familiar feet sitting parallel in the bathroom door. I looked out the window and there was no one to take the clouds away from me.
(Translated by Laura-Elena Dobrin / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
