I was 5 years old when my parents left me at Grandpa. It was a village where the peasants kept their dogs tied in thick, cold chains, tightened around the dogs' necks with rusty wires. Only that day, because of a doggy weather, Labiș, my only friend at that time, wanting to take shelter from the thunder, had taken refuge in the henhouse. When Grandpa found him, with the same wire with which he had been tied, he hung him from a beam and, crushing his head with a hair, beat him to death. I still can't forget his squeal.
(Translated by Andreea Tobă / 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 May 2022, the group has 8,350 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. 
