Pick a nice, big rabbit from the cage, my grandfather told me. Then he laid it down on a log, and told me to clasp its ears tight. He pulled out the axe stuck into the ground, hefted it into the air, and before I could figure out what he intended to do I was left holding the rabbit's head. With my legs spattered with blood, I took off crying. My grandparents looked for me all over the village. I had hidden in a washtub in the attic. I descended only when my stomach started growling. Grandmother had made rabbit stew. I ate polenta with milk.
(Translated by Ioana Ștefan / 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. 
