Alone, he has two pints in front of him and sighs. He takes turns drinking from each. Cheers, he clinks them and drinks thirstily, smacking his lips. How are you, Vasile? Hanging around, just like everyone else. Come with us, let's play backgammon. There's two of us, do you have room for us to sit? They look at each other and shrug. Come, we'll get another chair. He takes the pints, moves his chair, sits down, pulls a chair next to him. Sit here, dad, with Petre's kin, tell them something about their folks. Who are you talking to, Vasile? It's dad, don't you remember him? He came to drink that beer we didn't get to drink after the baccalaureate.
(Translated by Raluca Ioana Crucerescu / 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. 
