He had passed the corner of the summer kitchen many times, but had not seen the object. It had an irregular shape, a strange color, and was sticking out of the freshly disturbed earth by the puppy. He picked it up, wiped it quickly with his fingers, and looked intently at it. He did not recognize the shape or the material. Grandpa, what is this, is it a meteorite? No, this is the handle from the pot with unboiled sauce that your grandma used to chase me after I upset her. She was young then and she didn't like my jokes. Neither did I like her sauce, but then we both learned better.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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 December 2021, the group has 7.750 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. 
