I found Marinica on the scaffold last night, next to the kitchen window, he had fallen asleep with his bubble level in his arms. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed him if he hadn't been peckish so hard. It touched me. I woke him up gently and invited him to a meatball soup. I let him take a shower. I handed him my fluffy pink robe and I put his clothes in the wash machine. By the time I laid him down, he was already asleep on the couch. In the morning he went out the window cheerfully, I went out the door, each one going to his work. I'm going to try harder tonight.
(Translated by Otilia Mocanu / 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 March 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. 
