I wrote an essay about Gică Hagi, the best football player in the world. The teacher marked it with a 4, because I didn't write about a great Romanian artist. I explained to her that the goal with Columbia is as beautiful as a poem by Eminescu or a sculpture by Brâncuși. I made her angry. After school, I told my father what had happened. My dad took the rubber ball and together we went to the stadium in town. The grass was freshly watered and the square freshly whitewashed. I was Gică Hagi, he was Roberto Baggio. We both won that night.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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. 
