Dan was smoking a cigar on the lawn of his villa. He was deep in thought, watching the swans peacefully floating on the side of the lake. How the hell do these stupid birds manage to find a mate for life and people don't? I'm going through my fourth divorce in the last 12 years. And I know these two, her black and him white, since I was still with my first wife. How do they manage to stay together? Apparently, the divorce rate for swans with children is just 3%. And I have three kids, all for nothing. I ought to find myself a black woman. Maybe that'll work.
(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. 
