Once upon a time there was a king named Red King. He lived in a red castle, in a red market, where tourists used to bring flowers to Lenin's mausoleum and tout watches stolen from Germany. And that's what Red King used to do, sit all day. And so did his country. He ordered for the prime minister to come over and asked him a question. Tavarișci Oblamov, why are we sitting for this long, though? Oblomov thought about it in a wrong way for about two weeks. And then he answered, a defiant silence. Impressed, the Red King let the situation linger.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
