The Mall is almost empty. It is a late evening. An escalator goes up slowly. There is only Petrinel standing on it. He's still and he's staring at nothing. He's thinking again and again of what he should buy for Dorina. It is hard to take somebody by surprise, every time, after
thirty-seven years of marriage. Suddenly his eyes lit up. Epiphany. He smiles. He arrives at home and he gives her a cheese puff. Dorina knows she is his cheese puff and she asks him: yo, should I eat it, Petrinel? Dorina, don't eat it, because you only cook my goose, and if you eat our love too there will only be left the shit between us.
(Translated by Diana-Maria Croitoru / 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 April 2021, the group has 5.600 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, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
