Come on, don't be shy. I'm not gonna hurt you. I don't think I even could, with this stick up my ass. That's why I'm so stiff. What did you think? The hat? Duck egg, it's a popular colour. Yeah, I know, it used to be straw green, but you know? The sun. And I got the suit coat from the same place. From Georgescu. A fraud? Oh well, people talk. They say Ionescu is more honest. Nonsense. They're all the same. But I liked the colour. Bleu-ciel, he told me, rolling his eyes the French way. A sparrow landed on its arm, and the Scarecrow shut up.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
