I noticed it immediately, because of her covered eye and the deep wrinkles carved in her face. Being somewhat of an outsider it took me a while before I dared ask her: what happened to you? She looked at me with her uncovered eye and whispered: nothing. And then, before my astonishment got to carve wrinkles into my skin, she said: I covered it so I could only see half of the world's beauty. Don't tell me you also made those wrinkles yourself, I flashed her with a complicit smile. That was when she looked at me with the covered eye.
(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. 
