She steps in puddles and laughs with no teeth. She leaves traces of mud on the crooked tiles in the courtyard of the house. Not that way, girl, her momma yells, but she keeps hopping. She slides, rises, jumps. And so on. The mother's scolding softens. The doctor told her, her man told her, the whole village told her to not give birth to her then, cause she wouldn't come out normal. She did not listen. And the result was her, lame, deaf and mad. The rod traces on her back faded and the shivering woman was on her way to the pub. The evening approaches and her man is coming back home drunk, with his belt ready.
(Translated by Tania Diniță / 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. 
