Shock and terror in the dining car

I shyly enter the dining car and sit with my wife at a more secluded table.
Woah, can you Mr. Director X eat together with all the cheaps? Please come to the booth, the waiter told me. I know, salmon with vegetables and a cabernet. The same for the lady, yes? Puzzled, I make a google search. I look damn similar with X, a bigwig of CFR. I would drink a Dom Perignon, if I could. It's being solved. In 30 minutes a "quick train" leaves Bucharest and we have a crossroad in an hour in Nistoreşti. They shouldn't stop there but they will.

(Translated by Oana Oprea / 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.