It was the biggest corn puff I had ever seen. Corn puff, yes. No, not puffcorn. And I tried to pick it off the floor, but it was too heavy. I brought a concrete mixer to get it and I still couldn't. I even called the neighbours and still I couldn't manage. The police came, the army, the firefighters, the animal police and still none of them managed. I started to believe it would stay there forever. Fortunately a little mouse came and said to me: "What are you doing, poor soul?" and ate half of the corn puff and finally I was able to pry it loose.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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. 
