As a child, I used to help my mother cut them neatly with a sickle, then quickly gather them up without leaving any mess. After bringing them home in the yard, to the torture place, they'd be spread out on a tarp and we'd start beating them, allegro, as if they were horse thieves. Though their teeth were falling out with no end, they made no sound, no bleeding, no bruising, no begging for mercy. They faced everything with dignity, which made me think that the torment was good for them. The hats of the sunflowers remained without dark thoughts.
(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 May 2023, the group has 11,260 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. 
