What do you do when you can't fly? You float. That's what I did when I was 17, when my mother dropped half a container of pepper in the potato stew with her eyes trained on the movie Jesus of Nazareth. During the floating process, I tried to tinker with salt. I managed to get only a slow descent to the two-liter bottle of water that I sipped from instantly. After a meal rich in spices and minerals, I dis a good Christian crossing and asked if there was still pepper in the cupboard. Not for nothing, but I was about to go to the store.
(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. 
