You spilled the salt again, you fool, his father scolded him, smacking the back of his head simultaneously. His colleagues called him the cripple, imitating his stunted hand with his contractured fingers. Tired of bullying, he took to the hills and got a job at a restaurant. After working hard, he became a chef. The way he would sprinkle the salt was a real show. His crippled hand brought him fame. His former executioners walked his threshold, lured by his fame. For Nusr-et, the face they made at the sight of the bill was exactly the pepper he needed.
(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. 
