Her father was a drunkard. And stammered as well. When to declare her, at birth, he confused the syllables and utterd a jerky Ot-tilia to the clerk. Ottilia? Ot-tilia, he answered, panting as he leaned against the desk that swayed in time with the floor drain from the corners of his alcohol-filtered gaze. The clerk asked the mother: So be it, madam? As he says, she said submissively. Okay, then he whispered between his teeth: You couldn't find a normal name either, Shakira, Mercedesa, something like this.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
