Why are you peeling off the bread? When I was little I lived through the '47 famine; we, the children, were waiting in the evenings for our father, your grandfather, who was still working for the townhall. He used to come with the brown bread received from the State wrapped in newspaper and we were waiting around him 'til he cut it in equal slices, giving to each of us the portion that was supposed to last until the next evening. We were sleeping with the slice of bread next to our chests, like pray birds - my father said. I have never heard him say he was hungry and nobody knew to caress the bread with the knife as he did.
(Translated by Raluca Simion / 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 July 2021, the group has 6.800 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. 
