I'm having a drink with a neighbour, a
long-time pensioner. My companion worked for 40 years in the same factory. Unfortunately it went bankrupt and now a developer wants to build a housing estate on the site of the former factory. My neighbour is outraged but no one can take on the mayor and his friends who are building blocks everywhere. I also tell him about my many jobs so far. And I'm not finished yet because I've got a few years before I retire. But you've got the shkool of life, says the neighbour.
(Translated by Lorina Xiaoyu Hou / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
