Gicu, where else can you find meatball soup like the one in my pot? That 10-liter pot I received at the 7-year memorial service from my gran. That's all I got. Your parents saw me as a great cook, helping me stuff your belly. Yes, it seems just your belly. Because everybody signs up for the tripe soup too. Suddenly, they all love me when they hear what's boiling in the pot. Not one comes with a bouquet of flowers, or one of those vouchers saying, go treat yourself to a massage, your back must be thrown out from bending over the stove. You won't find it anywhere else, Gicu. Because there's no other fool like me.
(Translated by Lorina Xiaoyu Hou / 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. 
