he threatened me and demanded my wallet. He went through it, couldn't find anything and looked at me blankly. Money is tight, I complained. I just paid the installment for my daughter's house, the new refrigerator arrived, and it needs to be paid for, it's leaking through the roof and they gotta come and fix it, and it's autumn, do you realize how much it costs me to heat the villa? Where do you live, I ask angrily. With my folks, there's about ten of us, in a shed out back at Tomis. You see, that's the life. He began crying and handed me 10 lei to get a ticket home.
(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. 
