Born on the 32nd of January

Who is a martian
and a rich man of action?
The lyrics of Dani the Martian were booming from that green Tesla halted at the stoplight. The two little green men from inside the car were dancing, so passionately, that they didn't notice the cop approaching and knocking on their window.
Documents, please. Mhm. What do you mean born on the 32^nd of January?
Bzzzt.
Thank you, you may go.
What did you do to him?
Well, I combed his thoughts a little.
The Tesla sped away, blaring the chords from Galactic Kid Adi's song:
I fell in love with a bad martian girl
and she ran away with my heart on Terra.

(Translated by Jin Cristian Yang / 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.