She cut, folded, and glued, lengthening the slip of her fingers. She made many, of all colours, with wide feathers and necks stretched to the ceiling. That's how they'd found her after her last performance, slumped in her dressing room, glassy-eyed. Resuscitated, she had forgotten who she was, only her graceful hands still knew how to twirl the paper. Out of a grey nothingness, sounds sometimes came to her and she smiled at the colourful birds sitting on the black lake of the table. If she could, she would tell them dance, float, fly. But she didn't know that many words anymore.
(Translated by Andreea Grințescu / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
