My mother didn't breastfeed me, afraid she would inflict her chronic sadness on me. But that didn't do us any good whatsoever. Our blood had fused long before, from the first to the last cell in my body. I floated for an indefinite time in the small galaxy of her unwept tears before she had to throw me into the unfriendly vastness called the World. Her milk would have healed us, perhaps, but that version of us was lost forever in the ocean of non-manifested possibilities, like broken satellites adrift.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
