She was plucking the hen with such pathos as she hadn't had since she was a young daughter-in-law. She will send it to the girl, in town. She has a girl who is an important lady, working in an office, not a peasant like her. She had assured her tuition at university for 5 years but she doesn't regret it, as now she lives in the city, owns a big villa and an expensive car. She also has two grandchildren. How happy the grandchildren would be when they ate grandma's homemade chicken soup. No problem that it was the neighbour's hen. What made it want to jump in her garden? The neighbour has enough birds anyway, so one more or less doesn't count at all, no.
(Translated by Diana Stănescu / 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 March 2023, the group has 10,790 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
