In our village, Ion Ursitu' found a book about numbers in his backyard. He's been pestering the old ladies for a month now. He slides in between them when they gossip and asks: on what day were you born? He uses a pencil to do some math, and the results say that she'll die in a month or two. You should see the church on a Sunday. Even the priest has it in for him, 'cause he goes around the cemetery at night carrying wooden stakes; so the priest, covered in flour, asks him: Hey, did you happen to find a book about numbers? I dropped it from the Heavens. Now he's quiet.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Ciucaşu / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
