The rooster could barely clear his through for the first crowing, that Gavrilă already began to swer. Poor Saveta was running about the yard with her drawers backwards so that all the poultry was looking at her cross-eyed. Diligent woman otherwise. She gave the calf water, took the chicken out of the pen, she'd even split logs because her man needed his polenta. And this is how she'd spend her time until the sun reached the top of the hill. But it still wasn't enough for Gavrilă. Until she calmed him down. She spiced up his polenta with all the salt and pepper he'd cursed her out with. It is said that, to this day, Gavrilă is drinking down all the wells in the village.
(Translated by Constantin Istrate / 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. 
