$ 8.000.000

We don't have a TV anymore. Actually, we haven't had any devices or gadgets for years. We don't have electricity anyway. We don't have co-workers, or relatives or neighbors. We don't have friends or foes. We don't have clothes or anyone to hide from. It is just us on the entire Earth. It is empty and it is all a desert. We don't have children, we don't have parents, we don't even have hair on our heads, or teeth in our mouths. We don't have food nor water to drink. We have eight million dollars, someone said, and they all dropped dead because he had breathed in the last lungful of oxygen.

(Translated by Diana-Maria Croitoru / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Professor James Brown)


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.