The dromedary enters slamming the door. A vodka. No one is looking at the cute, thirsty, fiery animal. The buzzing stops for a moment and a few chairs creak. Yo'. And one of those fancy caffe lattes with sweetener and a dash of organic cinnamon. 253 eyes turned, silent for a few seconds. A crow crowed, but the lion stopped it with a paw behind its head. A feather was discreetly breezing into the highly charged air. Yo', who's in charge here? A pedantic cow brushes off a non-existent lint and mooed. You donkey, this is a library. This is where the thirst for culture is quenched.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / 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 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.
