Gelu used to work on a typewriter for a satire magazine. He was working up the courage to write fifty shades of Romanian battles. Because the Romanian people are experts in battles, given the fact that they kept working around winning throughout history. However, this struggle wasn't working, so he ended up working up a sweat and having his work cut out for him. He could have worked the system, but he wasn't stupid enough to work himself over. He put in the work and, out of fear of being out of work, worked out an idea and it worked like a charm.
(Translated by Marta Fulga / 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. 
