He used to wait for me at the gate, I always brought him good food and a bone. He was the most beautiful of the stray puppies. They weren't afraid of people, of the dark or the cars. I always lost one: Don't cry, Lia, they're just dogs. My colleagues didn't know I was afraid for him. He had deeply gotten into my soul. And I as well. Poor puppy. There came a gloomy day when he didn't show up. In vain have I looked for him. He disappeared. One night I dreamt a painful truth. Bruno - my happy puppy, was chasing a bone on the Milky Way.
(Translated by Alexandra Lica / 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 February 2022, the group has 7,950 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. 
