I was at the office when my cop friend turned up as I was about to leave. He had a complicated case and wanted my help. It was an odd case about a suicide by hanging. At first glance, it was straight forward, there was even a suicide note. But looking at the pictures of the suicide, something jumped out at me- there was no chair or ladder around the body. How did he manage to climb up to hang from the ceiling? I read through the suicide note. It wasn't written at the time of the suicide; it was much older. It was definitely a murder disguised as a suicide. The hard part was just beginning.
(Translated by Cristina Ioana Bontea / 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. 
