Santa bought Matei a lamb with soft and curly fur. The little boy tied a red string with a bell around his neck. Mommy, his name will be Mihai. All day they were running around the yard, tripping us. The wet muzzle nudged our knees, looking for a playmate. Mihaiii, Mi-haaai. Where would he have hidden, the little ball of fur? A whimper comes from the yard below, from the pile of wood.I pass among the hens that were quietly taking a sand bath. Another whimper. Mihai was wailing, his neck caught between two logs. The bell seemed even redder, soaked in blood. He was gone.
(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. 
