Every night a new nightstand was installed in the royal bedroom, which the king was invariably unhappy with. Either because it wasn't roomy enough, or because it didn't match the drapes. So the furniture ended up on the fire the next day. After three years in which the vizier had exhausted all the craftsmen in the kingdom, his daughter, Scheherazade, went to the king with a
flat-packed nightstand from Ikea. Legend has it that Scheherazade deliberately hid the assembly guide and the two assembled for days until, exhausted, they devoted themselves to love.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Marinescu / 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 January 2022, the group has 7.830 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. 
