How come, chief, I ain't took nothing but an old coat that your maid threw away. Let my hands fall off if I took anything else. I wasn't sneakin' around to watch you leaving, to come in to steal from you. I ain't even got in your house; I ain't even know how it looks like inside. Let my eyes dry out if I stole one needle at most; let alone the suitcases with money under the bedroom floor and the jewels behind the painting. My son ain't done that either, I swear by my life. Corporate boy, come here and tell this mister that you hasn't stolen nothing from him.
(Translated by Mihaela Dumitrescu / 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 March 2022, the group has 8,050 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. 
