A new shipment of VHS cassettes had arrived. The films were to be translated and delivered. People were hungry, from those boxes they gleaned how others lived in the West. They were watched in secrecy. They sent for her, she was an
underground translator. She only had one shortcoming, all swear words were translated as:
go to hell, goddamn it, holy Moses. They sensed the deviation in their cultural hunger. When she was fired long after that time, she took revenge and screamed at her boss the loveliest:
your mother's onion in Romanian.
(Translated by Ioana Ștefan / 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 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. 
