I was nauseated by that pointless life, lived dictated by others, and I kept telling myself that I would never be stupid and cruel like the man who held me captive under the pretext that I was his wife and that a woman should be submissive. I had tried twice to run away but the chip he had put under my skin warned him every time I went beyond the perimeter. My dreams were the only thing he couldn't control. And what I was doing in the toilet when I was washing. I'd sit and stare at the black ivory figurine whose wings I had sharpened. It was time.
(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. 
