All night the wind rattled the shutters and disturbed their sleep. The next day, the shop had pink shutters, mullioned windows, a window decorated with linens and trinkets. The women burst in, the men grew restless. The owner, a friendly blond minion, was taken to questioning. Domestic strife broke out. When the floor was set up, the men began to enter the shop. The girls upstairs were just as petite, blonde and kind as their mistress. She had arrived with a handful of buttons. Now she had the keys to the city.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
