My parents had a good status in the village. My mother would always put a generous slice of ham and bread in my backpack. That ham tasted so good it made your taste buds tingle, no joke. My classmate, a silky boy with sky-blue eyes, didn't have any to go. I always helped him with his homework and encouraged him to learn by promising him half of my lunch. That's how the last years of middle school passed. Now he's a vet. We met by chance at a barbecue. He handed me a piece of ham. For some reason, it tasted like childhood.
(temă în parteneriat cu
Ideo Ideis, 2022)
(Translated by Liliana Popescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 August 2022, the group has 9,000 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. 
