There were two brothers, Ivan and Igor, and when they were born, it was November and people were celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution. Their father had uncorked the last bottle of vodka stolen from the kolkhoz and, as he couldn't bring himself to drink it all by himself, he drank with his neighbour, who was a Roman Catholic priest, when being a civilian. After an odd number of drinks, the children were referred to as Adam and Eve, but as neither boy was yet a girl, they were called something like Mario and Luigi until their mother, relatively less drunk, called them Ivan and Igor once again.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / 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 December 2022, the group has 9,880 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. 
