Under the Caretaker's warm, sad gaze, the boy Claudiu wrote, biting his nails. Dear children's home, please look for my mother. Tell her I'm being good. Ask her to come and bring me woolen socks and sponge cake with Turkish delight. And fresh milk for the black kitten I found and hugged really hard with lots of love who is so hungry he hasn't woken up since then. He licked the stamp and the Caretaker sent his letter to the newspaper. On the news they discussed his case for fifteen minutes. He was given neuroleptics.
(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 May 2021, the group has 6.400 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 Ficţiuni Reale. 
