The wife of Father Aghesmie dropped the heavy shopping bags. She barely made it up the four floors. She stopped to catch her breath. She opened the door to the studio. A stale smell of sweat mixed with cigarette smoke hung in the room. Empty bottles lay on the carpet. The ashtray was full of cigarette butts. Father Agheasmie was only in his underpants, handling the joystick. I can't get past this level, His Holiness shouted, his eyes bugging out. On the TV screen, Mario and Luigi were bouncing frantically from side to side.
(Translated by Andreea-Iulia Ciucă / 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. 
