I have lived with my grandparents for seven years. Life was both good and bad, but at seven you don\'t have any kind of special glasses that can help you understand difficulties. As soon as school started, a dragon family snatched me from my nest with orchard and grapevine-shadowed yard and brought me among ugly, bleak and desolate buildings. I have a phobia about parents ever since. Grandma was soft and kind. The dragons wanted you strong, diligent and reliable. They wouldn\'t back down from making the most dreadful of threats. They breathed fire when you happened to get low grades. Even now I dream only of her.
(Translated by Cristina Stan / 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. 
