To strike hard the nails, like a chopstick at Easter, the gravedigger told the disciple. That bloody sound who betrays many: he will never be born again. It's ready. Then I remember theirs. And they're better. Second, if you're a little coward, don't look your parents in the eye. There's desolation. It dries you. And the third: you drink after that until you cry like the little one when he did it to me, you drink so that we don't get bored. That cry will remind you again that this is why we are born, to make others happy. And you'll be able to laugh tomorrow.
(Translated by Bianca Dumitru / 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. 
