Tomas was looking into the distance, absently. He was 6 years old and sad and ignored. He had just been kicked out of the house by a freaked out mother, who was shouting at his father to move faster. Last month he found himself being introduced to his future wife, a
cross-eyed girl from the village. Yesterday, his father kicked him out of the room when his phone rang. He heard him through the door talking sweetly to his love, but Mommy was in the kitchen. A masked gentleman asked him if his parents were home. Yes, they're hiding all the gold in the cellar, because the
absent-minded men are coming.
(Translated by Claudia Alexandra Văcărescu / 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 January 2021, the group has 3.000 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
*Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale. 
