If I were to criticize my wife, a nice girl nonetheless, I would say that she's impulsive. But I don't do it, because I don't like to see her suffer. Her hand hurts so much after she slaps me, that I start to tear up a bit out of emotion. The other day, while returning from shopping, she deduced, I swear she didn't see me, that I fancy the woman next door. She dropped the bags, and slapped me so hard, we both burst into tears. She cried because of pain, while I did because I was proud I had a tattoo of my wife's ring on my cheek now.
(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. 
