Listen to your old man, don't enrol in a lathing high school, do you want to spend your whole life standing up near the machine with your eyes wide open looking into the shaft? Enrol in a locksmithing one. You sit on a chair and you rub a file left right. After eight hours your robe is as clean as if you were in a pharmacy. Or you unscrew screws. Where there's no head in a cross you use a slotted one. Or a hex key. That's even easier. You hold the keys on a keychain. But father, I want to enrol into the arts. I dream of becoming an actor performing Shakespeare. Let me hear you perform hunger. First you get an occupation. I said it.
(Translated by Jessica-Polixenia-Cristiana Copilaș / 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. 
