I was seeing him every morning at the school gate, he just sat there and paid no attention to anyone. I once tried to offer him a pretzel but he ignored me and moved over. My heart was breaking because he seemed lost and scared, but he wouldn't let anyone approach him. Older children chased him with stones but he always came back. One day I got out of class earlier and found out his story. He wasn't lost, he was a
second-grade girl's dog. He accompanied her in the morning and waited for her at the gate.
(Translated by Mălina Ioana Butaru / 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. 
