Gee, girl, good thing you give us a call. Tell me, will we see you on TV? But where? At the cinema? Did you turn into a starlet? At that big theater in Bucharest? At a small one? Did you write one of those plays that make us laugh and cry? You're also a writer. You're rich now. But why not really? There's no money for culture. There's not, darlin'. No worries, aunty will send you a package: eggs, cheese, your aunty will throw some coins in there too. If you needed art, now life is hard. But know that Aunty Flori is waiting for you with work, whenever you want. I'll make a man of you.
(Translated by Tania Diniță / 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. 
