I wasn't too lucky but even when it hit me I knew that the fate of mankind lay in my power of selection. I had found a Chinese version of Aladdin's lamp, Xio Mping's lamp, in my great-great-grandmother's dowry chest. I'd rubbed lamps before in my life, but this one only got cleaner. I was almost ready to give up gloriously, when a little pleonastic Chinese man suddenly appeared and said: Shoot motherfucker, it's Chian Xa Ta. I didn't blink, I knew what I wanted. I want a goldfish.
(Translated by Cosmina-Florentina Ciobanu / 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. 
