I was damned to ask Catrina today if she knows what the eighth wonder of the world is, just to mess her up. Turns out I found my match. I don't know, she says, I just came from church. Well, the eighth wonder of the world is technology. It's sensed even into the holy church and within the parishioners. I went to sit in the pews, because my bones have been hurting, and I pray. But the evil never sleeps. Today, in the stalls, with their phones in their hands, some ladies were reading real fiction. God help us.
(Translated by Oana Irina Oprea / 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 February 2022, the group has 7,950 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. 
