I'm listening to Cargo and looking sheepishly at proverbs, sayings, life advice, jokes, and nonsense about endless love and blooming trees. Where are the true men from the good old days? They are eating salo with breadin the tunnels at Salva-Vișeu and they soak it with leeks at Bumbești-Livezeni. Or are they eating corn roasted on the gas from Agnita-Botorca? Or are they swimming in the Bicaz dam and sunbathing at Black Sea Canal? I put a star on the map and I'll look for them, and I'll parade their shadows on the main road of real fiction singing. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, boom.
(Translated by Bianca-Andreea Rîmboacă / 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. 
