These poor folks have no idea how crappy this little town is. Secrets rot at the roots of the chestnut trees, like a woman's womb eaten by disease. The redhead lit up a cigarette without asking for permission. Tight dress, sharp canines stained with lipstick. She's not devastatingly beautiful, just enough to be bothersome. There's something so sad in her eyes, I feel like I want to protect her, to save her. Roxy Piper. Mucea, Mucea Zinel, private detective. She hands me a hard disk labeled KGB. Hmm, kinda suspicious, why didn't they write 1TB?
(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. 
