Commuting is exhausting when your car's broken. But you hear things that are not to be missed. I was sitting at the downtown stop on a bench and was eating a pretzel, ashamed that I was in public and it was freezing. Sesame, salt and poppy fell and fed the white pigeon that was walking by me with a bounce in its step. He was immaculate and graceful. From around the corner the drunken beggar, with vomit on his leather jacket and 7 concentric circles of dry piss in different stages on his ripped jeans howled at the winged being. Get away you bloody grisly thing.
(Translated by Monica-Andreea Gaman / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
