$ 8,000,000

Eight million dollars. He clutched the bag to his chest as he ran. Eight million. All mine. Had it been worth selling his memories for all this money? Obviously. He was still running even though nobody was after him. Eight. All mine. And what plans he had to spend them on. Strange, now he couldn't remember any. But he had a lot, of course. He stopped. Why the hell am I running? And what's with this bag? He opened it. Inside - a shaggy man was looking at him disappointedly from many, so many, paper rectangles. What the hell could these be? He threw the bag away and walked on quietly.

(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.