And that's when I watched Tom and Jerry for the first time. They were so funny. At school, the picture above the blackboard was missing. The comrade, sorry, the teacher told us to tear the first page of the Alphabet. But the portrait was still the right answer when she sat me up from my desk to ask me who was the person speaking on the radio we were listening to in reading class. At home, there were no electricity shortages anymore and father didn't have to challenge us with childish games for us to behave until the light came back on. Ever so slowly, we were emerging from the dark.
(Translated by Diana Pașcanu / 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. 
