We were at the age of puberty, when hormones were running through us like waltzers at the fair. Crina was always being teased; either a hand on her chest or on her rounded back. She was big, we called her Calu. One day she came with an apple, cut it in 4 and said: whoever eats a quarter of an apple first, I'll show them my hoopoe in the woods. Like a frog in a pelican's throat, the quarter went into my stomach; I went to the forest trembling with suspense and excitement. Calu gave me a good thrashing, so I said: if that's what the hoopoe looks like, I'll never get married.
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / 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. 
