Playstation 9

No matter how much Cătălina pressed the arrow down, the Morningstar did not go down. For days she looked for the right combination to reach the star. Sky, sea, triangle, square, square. And she succeeded. Only he had superpowers and she, with one life, could not pass the level. She was stuck between the sky and the sea. To cheer her up, the cunning Cătălin brought two cups of wine. Since then she's been playing with his joystick and winning two or three battles a night until the drowsy birds say good night.

(Translated by Alma Teodora Miron / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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.