Before he left, pops gave him a bone. Find it, he said, and always keep it by your side. At that time, he didn't understand anything, but that bone was the only thing that pops left behind, so he held it tightly in the palms of his soul, all those years. Actually, he saw its purpose much later, when, cornered by some beasts dwelling around, he began to bark and bite into them, like a Mioritic Shepherd. Pops knew very well. He clenched his fists around the bone and set off straight towards Gligor the butcher, so that he would satisfy this hunger of his.
(Translated by Cristina-Bianca Ion / 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. 
