The day he took off his belt and beat him black and blue, the child had spilled the rotgut bottle. Had I any power over it, I would have killed him then. But I said nothing and took care of the child. The old woman took me to the garden, plucked some weeds and told me: five leaves, no more. While I was tightening the noose around his neck, I realised that the old woman was right. I had pulled the noose enough so that I could leave him on the outskirts of the forest. When I got home, I started making a polenta and boiled some milk. The child was asleep in my arms, the wolves had their stomachs full.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / 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 June 2022, the group has 8,500 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. 
