Everybody knew that if your car got busted, you had to find Gioli. He could usually be found at the
Cold Drawers Inn. On the bright side, Gioli would never turn you down. There were other skilled mechanics, but Gioli was a Mesiah of the gearbox. He would not just come up to you, he would ethereally float, squint towards the car and command you. Take the hook out 'cause it's broken, go buy another one, get some pinions too. Get 3 bottles of rum as well. Afterwards, he would float back,
clean-handed, and give you canon. Hey, a car must be handled just like a lady, you poor bastards.
(Translated by Marta Fulga / 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. 
