The ship had left Marseille and arrived in Sulina loaded with herbs and colonials. The captain, having fallen victim to a melancholic indisposition, left his second-in-command in charge and rushed straight to the harbor brothel. The matron, attractive and greedy, graciously pampered him when she saw the jewel's glimmer, hoping that his paleness will fade under the bed sheets. By chance, that same night, the milkman, the butcher and the merchant all found themselves in that very same place. Three days later, the cyanotic town was under quarantine.
(Translated by Marta Fulga / 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. 
