Some people are earnest, others are good. Some are fake, and others are earnestly good in being fake. Some try to sell you fables, others cheapies, oddities or some other rubbish displayed as something else. But somewhere in Bali I had an epiphany that you could find virtue even in falsity. On the door of one shop it was written in large letters, in order to be easily seen: 100% Genuine Fake Shop. The owner said, persuasively enough, that those copies were even better than the originals because they helped keep more people from starving. I now have a PLIMA undershirt.
(Translated by Ioana Stan / 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 February 2021, the group has 4.300 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. 
