Hell, hell of a man, I shouted at him as he was throwing punches in my stomach. You got away from him, I left him for you, my mom used to recall. But dogs are good, he was amazed. Over the years, he got heavily drunk and saw on the mirror at the toilet: You've become what your mother protected you from. The passing of years without a father left him a painful bruise. He shouted back: You are hell, hell of a man. And as void as he felt on the inside, his shout was as strong as a dog's bark. He broke the mirror and started to learn to accept being loved by the others.
(Translated by Luciana-Maria Buruiană / 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. 
