Once in a blue moon, I used to ask myself, what kind of forlorn mare I could end up with at the Wooden Horse raffle. She must have been carved by a borderline personality, since she had pink horseshoes and a steel mane made out of a rusty Wilkinson. They would blindfold us in the orphanage dining room, and the youngest among us would bring an Astrakhan hat filled with carvings made by other orphans who had already been employed. Blood has been shed that day, enough to remind me that no one would ever remember me.
(Translated by Oana Ionescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by conf. dr. Daria Protopopescu / Edited 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 October 2022, the group has 9,400 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. 
