I had solved several cases lately. The boss had promised me that he will let me catch a big fish. I was a little tired of catching guys who were cheating on their partners.
I also had some interesting cases, but a few. The hardest was the case of the booksellers from the downtown library where they were stealing books in an ingenious way.
It needed a month to figure out how they did it. The boss calls me and hands me a file. It was my next case. I went out and called the agency asking for a ticket to Alaska.
(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. 
