While the breast pump is pumping the last drop of milk, the tears make the whitish liquid salty, and the hand, with the wrist wrapped in bandages, throws the contents of the small jar in the toilet. He was declared dead at birth, but the body performs its natural function and it will go on like this for the next few weeks too. An act of letting go of the pain into the depths of despair. No wonder she takes her painkillers with vodka. And the fact that he left her, now when she needed him the most, makes her look at the asphalt from the upper floor of the huge villa.
(Translated by Valentina Mihai / 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 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. 
