I don't like dogs. I am terrified by their
perfect-victim glance. In their eyes I see the same memory over and over again: us sitting at the table, father having a full glass in front of him. Mother, having that poor dog look in her eyes and
high-pitched voice, repeating a litany: stop drinking, for goodness' sake! You make yourself ill. That moment when I put myself in his shoes, I saw her through his eyes, I felt his frustration and the impulse to hit her. The explosive mix of irritation, weakness, horror and guilt. And the shock: I understood the enemy and he was human, just like me.
(Translated by Diana Stănescu / 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 August 2021, the group has 7.000 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 Ficțiuni Reale. 
