Man, listen, so I tell this magic goldfish my three wishes: to have as many riches as the sea has drops of water, to have a palace, and to be seductive. I don't know what the moron got out of that and in what order, but I found myself at the bottom of the sea, among the ruins of Atlantis, with him staring at me all enchanted. In a broken mirror shard I see he's turned me into a fish. Only my lips stayed the same. And right as I'm trying to tell the idiot that he got it wrong, he says to me: Hey, you don't have any wishes left. But you've got me, baby.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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 October 2021, the group has 7.275 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. 
