Boss, the wife has sent himfor us to shave him, cut his hair, wash him, dress him and all. We bargained for that expensive casket. But when it came to taking it home she said no, grooming him is already too much, that she got no dough and wanted a simpler one. In the end, we shook hands on a crate like the ones in the corner there, why should she spend so much on him, when he never did it for her.Them all says the same in the end. But, boss, I found him in the hallway. Put me back in the expensive one, he said. And he was really dead when I smacked him in the head with the kettle and took him back in the crate.
(Translated by Daniela-Andreea Gugescu / 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 September 2022, the group has 9,250 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. 
