In a parallel universe, a physicist bored with Strugatsky space - which they call Minkowski, although the equations are exactly identical - had a brilliant idea. Or so it seemed to him late that night after a bottle of wine and three bags of sticks, a sort of borax of our kind, but with salt, not with fligas or alve. Parallel universes are completely useless, he emphatically proclaims, the only one that matters is actually the universe perpendicular to all parallel universes.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
