It was getting on my nerves. She seemed to want nothing more than to get sick and make a big fuss about it. She'd call us in the dead of night, claiming to feel butterflies in her heart, saying they'd flown up into her eyes and were fluttering around in there. She'd say it was raining inside her and her legs were swelling up, and that she absolutely needed a coffin so she could rest easy knowing her transportation was sorted. Then she'd ask us to come over for dinner and talk about falling leaves and other such nonsense. And to top it off, the neighbour called me to say that she was rushing to paint her coffin with big, purple flowers. I mean, come on, who even likes purple anymore?
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / 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. 
