I rub the cloth closet hard. Suddenly, a light and I'm in front of a misshapen little man on a ship. Seriously, asshole? Do you know how busy I am? Yeah, you're a real slob. I take out the alcohol, I puff it up and down, and I start to tidy up. Hey, boy, what's this? One lever up, one lever down? And the buttons. Either on or off? That cannot be possible. I wake up with a slap upside the head. Stop. This is UFO, says the little man. So? This is OCD, I say, as I give him another puff. He slaps me again. He sends me home. I'm going to rub. Shit. He stole my rag.
(Translated by Florina Șamata / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected 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 February 2023, the group has 10,500 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.