He is tall, thin, with close eyes and a big nose. Everyone in the village called him Mercedes, since he had entered the herd of cows with his second hand car. Because the brakes left him. He sings that he has gone to Olt and frowns so pathetically that his forehead remains furrowed. He is the ugliest boy in the village, but she would only look at him. If I were an attic, I would cross the Olt without asking you for a penny. I'd take him with you and I wouldn't let you go. His eyes go out of shame and he prays. God forbid our little girl looks like him.
(Translated by Denisa Dărăban / 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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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. 
