A pack of Mărășești cigars, a handful of olives and candy for the rest. Grandpa use to send me to the store with 5 lei in my pocket for this. Sticky candy from the glass jar, they always had that at the cooperative. Small olives, black olives, maybe gemlik, were the only ones you could find. The cigars were grandpa's business only. But I made a rule only for myself: never to pass by the sheepfold. I cut through 3 rough alleyways to avoid brawling with those ferocious hounds, once was enough to last a lifetime. Grandpa, I miss that. You can't find Mărășești anymore these days.
(Translated by Elena-Diana Cocîr / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 November 2021, the group has 7.500 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. 
