I hope the hemp broomrape would get you, the woman cursed him. The officer grinned and ordered his servants to gather everything up, leaving no straws behind. And you, you madwoman, pack your stuff and get out of the village, or I'll burn down your house. Then he gets up on the horse and heads for home. In the field of flowers turned to the sun, he stopped to pick some hats for his wife. Maybe something stung him or maybe the sun burned him, but the next day he woke up cold and aching. When she saw him, his wife barely stifled a scream. On his cheeks grew, crimson red, large butterfly wings.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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. 
