Dan sat in bed with his 168.5 kg, surrounded by boxes of 250g of salad, plates of 150g of fish and 100g of grilled vegetables, and 500ml bottles of plain water with lemon. The TV was on Paprika TV, where chef John was cooking a beef burger with cheddar sauce, fried bacon, onion jam, spicy mayonnaise, and barbeque sauce. Suddenly, the door opened, and Dan's wife entered the bedroom, and Dan pressed the remote control and instantly switched to Eurosport. His wife smiled at him and left. Dan sighed in relief.
(Translated by Irina Giurgiu / 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. 
