I grew up in the slums, on the outskirts of a graveyard. One day, I went to the smoke shop to buy something. I passed a girl. Drop-dead gorgeous. She was the type that hanged out with the bad boys, the type hard-to-get and impossible to impress. I passed her and heard: Pst, pst. Hey, you! What do you eat to look like that? Do you eat planks, skinny boy? I wished the ground would have openedup and swallowed me. Especially because my folks ran the At Three Coffins funeral home, at the end of the street. I muttered Mhm. and gave her a strained smile, like a mute camel at menopause. I had seduced her.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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. 
