Twenty years I've worked for the departed, you see? I cleaned, I watered, stuff like that. But they made layoffs. Apparently, there's a crisis, no one comes to lead them anymore, to give away a bagel, koliva, a glass of wine. The undertakers arrive, they pull out the sack and they toss it in in no time. Unceremoniously. What was I to do, I switched over to animals. It's nice, I've never heard sobbing like this. Ladies cry over Bubico beautifully. It's full of love there, really, I never heard stuff like good riddance you
man-whore, you drunkard. Hey, won't you give a bone away for Grivei?
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / 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 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. 
