I sometimes succeeded in being spared a beating around my building. I used to tell them that I had brother who knew karate. Later on, I used to tell them that I had a brother who was a policeman. And then, as the horrible years went by, during the famine, I told them my brother was a butcher. I, myself, was working at the grocery store. They ended up begging me to talk to the karate fighter about taking care of a situation. To the policeman about some criminal issues.And to the butcher about some fresh meat. I used to bring them eggplants, cucumbers, cabbage and green tomatoes. They had no idea I worked somewhere else or that I had no brothers.
(Translated by Marta Fulga / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by conf. dr. Daria Protopopescu / 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. 
