I'm not Mrs. Șaterliț but neither is he Mister Casanovu, instead he straightens his hair rollers every time he shocks me with his infectious squint, when he looks at me through the keyhole and I only catch the whites of his eyes and it's like we're deadly in love with each other. The buttons on my coat harden at the mere thought that he might unbutton them like shoelaces, leaving me in nothing but the reindeer sweater I got as a gift from my mother-in-law. You're making me sick, Costello, calm down, calm me down. Mrrr.
(Translated by Delia-Maria Cocoș / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
