Under the ruckus of cheerful voices, the wailing of those who failed and the soaking heat, I was trying to make way to see if I'd passed the baccalaureate exam. 9,44. Good. I should have appealed the mark for the Romanian written exam. I knew that the five 10s I'd scored in the other exams were mauled by an inconceivable 6,66. But it was more important to have proof that I'd finished that school and could try my hand at the game of chance that the Faculty of Theatre in Cluj had cooked up rather than contesting a bogus mark. Thus I enrolled in a gang of phonies.
(Translated by Camelia Diaconu / 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. 
