Give me a penny, sir', God be with you. A ragged and dirty dress covered her frail body. Two trails of tears had dried on her cheeks, lice were crawling through her tangled hair, and boogers were dripping, glistening, towards her dry lips. When the story of a life that wasn't hers began to play on the big screen, on the opposite side of the wide square, she felt like she was coming out of her skin and slipping inside, entirely. And then, I know: what better escape than to get out of your heavy, dirty skin and get into some lighter ones?
(Translated by Andreea Laura Stanca / 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. 
