Luki, Luki, what are you doing in the tree? I was shouting for him from behind the fences. If he was in a good mood, he would give us the familiar answer, otherwise he would curse us and throw rocks at us. Luki had only one talent: he made mental calculations with amazing speed and accuracy. Sometimes, he would stop us on the street: Do you have one leu (it is the currency of Romania; one euro equals almost five lei)? I have. Let me do some calculation for you, ask me. Once, I wanted to make fun of him: If I was born on February 31, 1947, how many seconds have I lived so far? He grinned and answered me on the spot: Thirteen.
(Translated by Andreea Laura Stanca / 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. 
