Ioana, it's bedtime. A two years something gold lump in my life. Tell me a story, she mumbles. Inside out, I ask. No, out inside. That means from the book. Which one, I ask. The one with the goat. I start reading to her, I was dead on my feet. I skip parts, trying to shorten the film. The baby goats swallowed right away, the wolf caught in the trap. I hear sobbing from the bars of the cradle. What's wrong, baby boy, why are you crying. You didn't say glug glug at the meat rolls. He caught me there, my boy. The short film, a fiasco. Even now, after twenty five years, he would not let me forget.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Denisa Neagu / 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 June 2021, the group has 6.650 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. 
