He was laying under the blanket, with his hat over his eyes, strategically by the church fence. It started with a
four-digit counter. One dollar, one click in the course of the day. Three days later, he hired a girl who brought him food, he loved him. Within a month, he was taking a
three-bedroom central apartment, with a housekeeper. Not to keep track of the counter that started from scratch every few days, specifically order an
eight-digit one. This one was going slow, hard, barely getting to eight million. When will he get to screw it up? .
(Translated by Denisa Dărăban / 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 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. 
