Every summer, we used to visit the castle of rich relatives. Like any poor relative's child, I was particularly curious. One night, the butler caught me standing outside the door of a room I had never seen before and told me not to go in there. Intrigued, I hid, and when no one was around, I went in and saw a putrefying dead body. Bewildered, I asked my grandmother and found out that this was my great-grandfather and that he was being kept there so that we wouldn't lose his special pension.
(Translated by Angelica Ioana Curcan / 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 April 2023, the group has 11,000 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. 
