Poverty poured in the poor man's punched pouch when he reached in. His roaming fingers, feeling the poverty pouring, felt a spasmodic shiver behind the thin, meatless phalanges. That's why the poor poor man, finding a lost coin in his cold pocket, used it to buy a lottery ticket that would win him a million Euros. Luxury and opulence is what would've followed if his legs hadn't frozen while he slept under a white piece of cardboard, dreaming under a bridge.
(Translated by Carla Bețianu / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
