I smoked in the bathroom, I skipped classes for the movies, I fell in love, I fell out of love, I broke the neon lights with candy bites, I stabbed some guy in the butt cheek, with a rusty compass, did an impression of my workshop teacher, not knowing she was in class, I read everything but the required reading, I spent the days on the park bench, the nights on the quiet, at home, anywhere but at school. They gave me a bad conduct mark every year, they scolded me too, but I made the grade, honourably at that, even if there's one stupid thing I never did, I never cheated.
(Translated by Ioana Ștefan / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 November 2022, the group has 9,580 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. 
