She put on her armor and went to battle. She didn't know then that she would never take it off again. She ate dressed in it, washed dressed in it. Sometimes, she closed the visor and pretended to sleep, but her eyes wide open were watching for any dragons that might appear. Even her voice had become thunderous, to break through the metal shell. When her time came, they buried her still in her armor. And they didn't know that the rattling they heard from the armor was the soul of a princess that had hardened so much that it had become a button.
(Translated by Beatrice-Ioana Huruială / 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. 
