He had sold his herd for a dime, hoping to save Pușa, and upon hearing that he too was on his last legs, he lost faith in everything. When they came to ask for his mortgage payments on the estate, he got on the only horse he had left. A jade of a horse, older than time itself. The one who'd carried him home when he'd fainted in the scorching heat and the same one who'd dug him out from under the snowdrift of a terrible blizzard. They asked him when he would return to pay them their due. He said he would when horses might fly.
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by conf. dr. Daria Protopopescu / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
