On Saturday evenings, my grandmother would set me on the work table in the warm kitchen, wrapped up in the biggest towel I've ever seen in my life. You didn't eat at the work table, you only worked. You ate at the eating table, of course. Look at you, so pretty and clean, not even kings get such nice baths. C'mon, let's wipe you down with this lordly towel. You splashed around, almost pickled yerself. Look here, man, her lil fingies got all wrinkly again..., and so I always knew as a child that pickling in my grandmother's bathtub was a great luxury. And a joy.
(Translated by Bianca-Maria Ciucașu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan / 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 January 2023, the group has 10,220 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. 
