Sir, I has liked clocks since I was a little kid, you feel me, the tick-tock runs through my veins, let me see the problem here, clockmaker dad, clockmaker granddad, you pulled at it like crazy, you broke a spring, never I my clock-makin' life, don't go, sir, I'll fix it now, shut up, I'm concentrating, I had twen'y pendulums in the house and I was sleeping like a log, hey, the good ol' days, oops, the short hand is swaying, this gotta be changed too, now I can't get to sleep no matter what I do, there comes a time when time is too loud, that's it, it's ninety bucks, stop by again. Ya get me?
(Translated by Alin-Marian Mărgescu / 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 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. 
