He stole the cigarette from his dad. He lit it up, and held the smoke until he became dizzy. But then he heard his mom and threw himself over his 10th grade notebook: Ana has apples. What kind of apples does she have. His mom came in, sniffed the air like a hound, and got ready to smack him a couple of times. Just then, she saw the letter neatly inclined and strung together, black as the crows on an antenna's cable, or the cockroaches around a table, and her heart filled with pride: you are the only sapper writer in our line of gypsies and so you will remain, Nostradamus. And I'm your ma'.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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. 
