How many of you wrapped your books and notebooks in blue paper and wrote with a worn-out pen? How many of you ate soy salami and black bread on the cheap? How many of you secretly took butter? Only five of you? Well, those five citizens and I built this country. The rest of you are just slackers staring at screens and writing like Fred Astaire dances. You smell like fancy products. Goodbye to the textiles from Suveica and 7 Noiembrie. You walk around with crocodile on your chest and KFC in your belly. And make up your mind already, are you all about fiction or reality?
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / 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. 
