I lost my birth certificate. I couldn't go without it, I needed it at an institution, a bureaucratic thing. I went to the town hall of the village I was born in and an old lady, who still remembered me, what a brat were you, made a copy of it for me. I went back to the institution and I was told that my ID was not alright. I took a look, on the ID I was born on 23.08.1960, on the birth certificate it was 23.08.960. The old lady's machine had skipped 1. I changed my ID. I am 1062 years old, so today I'm going to write an application for overdue pension.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / 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. 
