The dispute had been going on for years. They were going to duel for their life. The two were best friends, students in military school, hussars in the same cavalry regiment. She'd passed them one day and seemed to smile at him, but not at him. He said she smiled at him, her galoshes were shiny and he replied that it was his plumage that had caught her eye. They chose fate to decide for them, they played Russian roulette until one was killed. He, the remaining one, married the cross-eyed bride who smiled sweetly at him and cheated on him with his adjutant.
(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. 
