What are you doing in Alaska? You don't look at you? You die of cold when the wind blows in the summer. You weight 30 pounds still wet. In Alaska, you need to be fat, because it's cold and the body fat keeps you warm. Off, you poor bastard. He's going in Alaska to muster the dogs because his cows are not enough in the yard.
And Gica left, too. Not out of ambition, but so he wouldn't hear his mom. And he became someone. The first Romanian to win Iditarod, the famous dog sled race. Seeing him on the news, his mom starts laughing: Close your coat laddie, or you will become a laughing stock.
(Translated by Mihaela Ţarida / 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. 
