Excruciating night of drinking. All he could remember were the words of the teacher and the village doctor. From some book that said love lasts for three. Since he'd been married for five, he took off and found another wife. Uglier, older and lazier than the first. After three months, he left her and chose an even worse one. How much did they say? Was it three weeks? Or maybe three days. Damned intellectuals. What if it was three hours? He couldn't go on like this. He went to the teacher to ask what the Frenchman actually said.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
