Grumpy, yet gentle, like any child in the first hours of its life, with a red, wrinkled face, his eyes glued shut and drool dripping from his mouth, hairless, the top of his head looked like a gelatinous ball, crossed by worm-looking veins; the child was fallen deep into his newborn slumber, wrapped up to his chin in a swaddle. The new mother, an 80 year old lady, was swarming in pain in her bed. Although a gooey matter was dripping out of the corner of her mouth, the sweetness of first laying eyes on the tiny bundle of flesh had erased from her memory the eight miscarriages she had.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
