With the first money he earned, he bought himself a small safe that he built inside the wall of his bedroom, hoping it would cast away the poverty he had grown up in. He stuffed it with dreams and ideas that would last him over 10 lifespans. He wasted them quite fast, one by one, due to inconsistency, and sometimes misfortune, without putting back, not even a dime. He found the safe more and more obnoxious. Instead of being his lucky charm, it was now the opposite, so he covered the door and hid it behind a wardrobe. The next day, he became a millionaire. He had won the lottery.
(Translated by Irina Bîlcan / 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. 
