A Hun of numbers, a Tatar of bumps on the head and a tyrant of midterms. He had evil eyes. We used to call him God, but he behaved like he was from Hell. I had missed classes for 3 weeks: I was delirious from the fever and my mom thought I wasn't going to survive. Now I was feeling better, but none of my classmates had the courage to come see me. One day, he appeared on our doorstep. Without a word, he started teaching. I was listening and crying. My mother was crying in the hallway. For a while, he came every single day, free of charge. We cried every day, sometimes together.
(Translated by Ioana Busuioc / 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. 
