You could read her age in the faded letters. Never had she been a beauty. She'd been born with pronounced features, sketched in red sharpie, contrasting with her dirty white complexion. She'd had one relationship, and it was toxic. After that she had retreated into a dark recess and built her own world, one in which she was a famous writer, read like those big, small-print labels. So many dreams, but what had become of them? After all, you can't become Voroneț blue when you were born Paris green.
(Translated by Oana-Roxana Dicilea / 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. 
