Down in the market, the aunties are sad, hardly anyone is buying their product. The only one whose business is flourishing is Vasilica. She sells jars of jam. They were horrified when she told them she shaved these weird fruits as a prep, which raised the price. Our Vasilica is unemployed too, but she has a merchant's spirit. Generous as she was, she bought pickled tomatoes for a few bucks from her booth neighbors and she made jam from them. She labeled it as some exotic seeded word and the curious customers bought it. No one suspected a thing. It wasn't a big deal.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
