I lie in the tall grass and nibble on a sweet straw, sharp on the tongue. I'm 16 years old, it's a hot summer and I can see him from here. He comes out of the barn and starts chopping wood. The ax becomes his arm, his arm turns to stone, his skin gets beads of sweat. She leaves the house with a steaming decanter. An insect tickles my nostril and makes me sneeze. He, with a smile in his voice: you came again? Get out of there so I can see you better. I jump out of the grass and run away, but later I hear him say: Geto, if it hadn't been you, I was marrying this little girl.
(Translated by Beatrice Porumb / 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 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. 
