The Little Gatsby

Today is my birthday. I was given as gifts a lead soldier, which I baptised as Matei, and three horn-shaped walnut cookies. I shared the cookies with him. I didn't eat much, though. Then I went into the jungle. My jungle is under a mulberry tree. I have a treasure hidden there - diamonds. I gathered a pile of them when a window got broken. I have hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. I had the soldier to watch over the treasure. I went to the sea to check my yacht. My sea is in a hole, filled up whenever it rains. The yacht was sunk; the paper had got soaked. I will make another one.

(Translated by Alexandr Cotar / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Professor Nadina Vişan)


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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.