With a arm longer than the other, I went to the local bar to wash the bitter taste of defeat. A skin and bones made me a barbarous armbar at
jiu-jitsu. I tried without technique to strangle him with my elbow, splurging on him like a 100 kilo pig. I was drinking and relating my humiliation. A girl from the table next to mine asked me how much can I bench press. " I don't know, I don't go to the gym, I mostly do contact sports." She took a sip of bear and said without blinking, "I am sure I can kick your ass."
(Translated by Camelia Băluţă / 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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
