I asked her nicely, I implored her, at first crying crocodile tears and then real ones that dug into my cheeks, made my eyes burn and my nose turn red. If granny was stubborn, I would wait for her to go look for something on the balcony, and then I would sneak into the kitchen, grab the trash can - it didn't matter that I had just emptied it two hours before - I would yell Imma take out the traaaash, leave the door open and run down the stairs to get outside, to my friends; getting to spend one more minute with them was a miracle, let alone one more hour.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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. 
