Your mother was quite inspired, Lucică, to give you this name. I loved her, I tell you, but a pretty filling woman she was. In thirteen days, I was fed up with romance for like two years ahead. And when I figured that out, gone I was, like a bat out of hell, no joke. Guess what, we were together for barelytwo weeks and she was already commenting about me going fishing. Eh, youth, youth. And you're saying she sent you to look for me, \'cause you want to become a bricklayer? Yeah. When's your birthday? On the thirteenth of the thirteenth, replied the young man without blinking. The craftsman smiled under his moustache and looked at him closely.
(Translated by Ecaterina Bucovanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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. 
