First there was the National Physics Competition, then the Chemistry Competition, then the Miss Universe Competition and so on. I won them all even though I hadn't set out to. One night they visited me, dressed all in white with their faces covered. They injected me with something and I fell unconscious. In the morning I woke up with a small bruise on my neck. A few years later, on TV, I see reports of a great scientist who looks exactly like me. Then a woman geneticist. Then an astrophysicist. God, who am I?
(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. 
