Three years ago, I was on a beach in Africa. A local approached me, he was selling strings of beads and other handmade stuff. We started to chat. I found out he had come here from his village to make money, so he could afford to buy cows. In their culture, if you have cows, you can bid for a wife. The more cows, the better the chances. He had no cows yet, he was young, banished from the tribe. When he found out we don't do auctions, that it only takes a cow and an ass, he asked me to marry him.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
