My car's battery died. A handsome guy wearing a leather jacket leaves the shop, heading to his jeep. I approach him, asking nicely to give me some current. We connected our cars with cables, plus at plus, minus at minus. It was zero degrees Celsius. The engine started to purr contentedly. As a way of thanking him, I asked him out for a coffee. He refused me; he was married. Tomorrow I'll pick a different place. I'll leave my car with the lights on for several hours in front of a Mall. In the end, I have to hook up to, pardon me, hook up with someone.
(Translated by Ecaterina Buşe / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
