the penguin had asked, resting its jaw on one wing while looking sappy at the brown trout behind the cashier, a fat mullet with withered scales. He could have driven alone, but the road was long and tiring. So, taking a blue whale wasn't so expensive, 20 sardines being a reasonable price and could even catch a baby tuna, because no one would accept to catch a nap due to lack of hygiene of the species, the vortex created behind the whale pulled them all as a liposuction on the hips of the Muraena fish.
(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. 
