I was seven years old when my folks told me grandma went away to a friend from abroad, called Geta. I kept asking about her but with time, I forgot. A few years later our parrot died. On the one hand, we all stared at it, hoping it was faking it. On the other, we were relieved, because we had taught it every swear word on earth and it was getting increasingly difficult to bring people over. It's swearing at nana now, said mom and instantly regretted it. That was when my fear of traveling went away. The classic fear of Geta stayed, though.
(Translated by Bianca Ioana Prisecaru / 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. 
