She was lying on the cold bed, watching intently the doctor who was silently leafing through the autopsy report. She was laughing inside of herself, knowing that no one would be able to diagnose a striped heart. How to explain to him that this was how she treated her pain? Look, that crooked line represented her school years, the small and almost obliterated one was her long-forgotten marriage, another deeper and almost crimson was for lost friendships, and the worst of all was the night she'd tried to erase all, jumping from the ninth floor.
(Translated by Iuliana Mocanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
