Costeluş enters the house a little tipsy. It is quiet. Rodica is watching her
TV-series and nothing will make her get up until the break. That's nice. Maybe he'll get a chance to shower. No. He won't. The commercials started. And with them the 10 minutes nagging. Yeah, Rodicuţa, I'm not spending any more money on beer, at the pub with the guys. A new shoebox appears in his line of sight. Say, Rodico, aren't those shoes you've bought also a waste? There's no more room for them in the house. Come on, Costeluş, commercial break's over, she softened. Can't you take a joke?
(Translated by Andreea Grinţescu / 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. 
