I'm getting my toolkit, it's already night time. I'm off. I walk slowly down the rickety stairs. They could have installed an elevator, the restoration of the castle is financed by European funds, I think. Hey, wait a minute, I hear. A pale guy looks at me with tired eyes. He's wearing a cape overalls, I love the design. Are you a house painter on Mr. Titi's team? I ask. No, I live here. Don't you want to be friends? He approaches slowly, he's tall and slim, a shiver runs through me. Two meters away he stops, wrinkling his nose. Oh my, what have you eaten, he says. Baloney with garlic, I say.
(Translated by Anca Maria Florea / 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. 
