Yeung was her sun, she had always loved him, from dawn until dawn. Li-Hua was poor. And she had a fault: she loved. Stop following me like a shadow, he told her. It took her years to learn the secrets of doll handling. Now is the night of the very first performance. Beyond the silk curtain, Yeung. Over here, her, his shadow. 10 strings tie her hands to the dolls. Umbilical cords. Light diminishes. The shadows are rising. They laugh and they cry. They fall and they rise. They live. Yeung applauds, he doesn't see any string, he likes it.
(Translated by Jessica-Polixenia-Cristiana Copilaș / 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. 
