The old man is shaving in the shard of mirror hanging below deck and I watch the blade rasping on his rough cheek. Go hang yourself, whey-faced kid, this is not a boat, it's my body, bones of my bones, that are you are trying to seize! I don't owe anyone anything, I don't care about those fees of yours, you landlubbers, yes, go and complain to the harbor master. The sea is my God, I worship her, and when my time comes, I, old Eurico, will put a hole in the boat and go to the bottom with it all. This is what you should tell them.
(Translated by Diana Pașcanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
