For the life of him he just couldn't understand. In the morning he was as happy with his house as snails must be with their shells. Or hedgehogs with their spikes. After all, a house is what you put between you and the world. But he had to leave home without a house, he was no snail, and as for hedgehogs, he only resembled one when it came to sharp words. The problem is that in the evening the house welcomed him with the heavy stink of rank garbage and stagnant dishwater. Why, he had no clue. We, however, from the ceiling of an omniscient narrator, know that the poor wretch left the TV on the news.
(Translated by Cristina Fliter / 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. 
