The chalk was blue. Chak boo, I remember while I'm drawing a wide circle on the carpet. Then on the sofa. On the wall, next to the fridge. On the fridge. On my hands. On my arms. On my legs. Now we're cleaning, explains Ma. I'm keaning, I remember and I erase the drawings with my bear hands. Tzen oftzen. One, two, fife, tzen. Boo. I only have a stump of chalk left. I split it in half. What does it taste like? Wow, it's not sweet. Maybe the other half? Spit it now, spit what you put in your mouth, Ma starts screaming and following me, but I clench my jaw and I hide under the table.
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / 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. 
