In order to help the young women who moved from the city to our village, I suggested that I teach them how to cook polenta. An essential dish if they wanted to marry a distinguished lad. We would gather in my kitchen when Vasile, my husband, was away for work, I would put the pot on the hob and explain the whole preparation process to them. Yesterday I caught Vasile in bed with Cerasela, the young woman who had come from the very capital. With the pot stick in my hand, I asked him why he cheated on me. He said the girl cooks polenta better than I do.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / 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. 
