I joined a literary group. We gather weekly at The Hunchback restaurant (Cocoșatu') and, by turn, each one of us has to say a new riddle. If no one guesses the answer, he gets free drinks, otherwise he pays the entire bill. Today is my turn. I am going to kick their asses. I just heard a funny riddle: it's round and crooked and its head hangs down. I wrote it down on my hand, but, towards the ending, the paste in my pen ran out. By the time I got to the bar, I forgot the answer. I am desperate: I don't get my salary until next Thursday.
(Translated by Nina Tufă / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 September 2021, the group has 7.150 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. 
