My wife was the happiest, when I got tired one of them would fill in for me; carrying the groceries, I mean, what do you think? Then she copied me too, not physically, there were enough of us; she followed my example and made several versions of herself, when one got tired, she'd take the other's place in nagging. She said: didn't I want a ménage à trois? That's déjà manege, nightmarish Carousel. Still, it motivates me to be the best version of myself and better than yesterday's. Literally. Curtain falls. The audience applauds. They're laughing mechanically, laughing out loud in the same way.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. Eliana Ionoaia / 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. 
