We're popping like popcorn under the heat, and she's questioning me narrowly as if we were at the Inquisition. She wants stories of fairies and princes. What should I tell her? That her grandfather was a dragon who knocked me up the very day I finished the 12th grade? That my folks treated him like a king - after all, they wanted a big wedding with the chicken dance and all that fuss? That my John, as he used to call himself, left us all hanging and took off the English way with my maidenhood,the money for the shindig, and my father's gold watch? Well, that was a long time ago. Dinosaurs were still alive.
(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. 
