At the entrance of the building, a man with a vaguely familiar face carries in his arms a big plastic box with two pickled cabbages, floating deliciously pink in its juice. I look tenderly at the cabbage, swallow hard and tell him. Lucky you, that's pure health. Do you want them? he says. Well, if you don't need them. You sure, I wouldn't want to... Thank him and take them, I entered the house with my second floor neighbour's cabbage. What's that oil, what's that gas? It can even rain with magnolias now, I have sauerkraut, I'm rich.
(Translated by Oana-Roxana Dicilea / 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. 
