Since he'd come back from Italy, Perică called himself Pepe. After years of twirling ragazza and pizza about, he came back witch certain affectations, and begat to raise ducks. Without a market, and without the help of his parents, the duck farm went under in less than a year. Two tobacco harvests followed, both calamitous, and a car wash without any success. Disenchanted with the rural market, he used his last few euros to open up a pastry shop which he named, naturally, Sale & Pepe. Sale was his wife, who stayed in Rome so she could finance his business ideas.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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. 
