If you're depressed, go outside in -25C, your brain will be more concerned about warming you up, he said. I took my dog and went out. I would have stayed there on the hill to freeze to death, but my brain was now more morally concerned with the dog. Why should he freeze with me? What was his fault? Of course he wants to live, even more, he wants me to live too. How to explain to him. You can't talk to children and animals. What am I saying here? Look, Gebo, how beautiful. Reddish sky, untouched snow and us in the middle of the night.
(Translated by Oana Georgiana Minea / 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. 
