First, there was the Pica Pica. The magpie would gulp down everything it stole, everything that shined and rattled. Then my wedding ring went missing, I didn't care, but I would get scolded for it. One by one, she ate the marriage certificate, the car keys and house documents. As everything went missing, I started feeling better. I think it ate him, too, because one day, he didn't come home. That was when the hunger came. A strong, urgent and inexplicable hunger. I ran into the cornfield to stuff my mouth with dirt. She, a lover of food, was pecking on seeds. A drought was coming.
(Translated by Diana Mîndruță-Tănăsescu / 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. 
