She had left to take on Paris. She heard about 59 Rivoli, a paradise of artistic creativity and she was yearning to become famous. For now, she was washing dishes in a fancy restaurant, angrily chewing some olives the chef rejected, but her stomach didn't. She remembered her grandmother's leek stew, and the squished, bitter olives she had once also rejected. She turned the water off and spit the pits in the sink. She tossed her apron and dashed out. That night she painted a bunch of leeks. Then everybody knew about her.
(Translated by Monica-Andreea Gaman / 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. 
