He takes the blunt knife and mercilessly cuts the meat into thick slices. His salivary glands are stimulated, his mouth fills with saliva, and he swallows hard a few times. On one side, salt; on the other, pepper. He splashes water onto the sizzling stone, ahot fire beneath it, and steam rises. With a greedy smile, he places the meat down; strands of blood drip, hissing. He bites his lower lip, murmuring something. He sniffs the sweet scent through the curtain of smoke rising towards the ceiling, and his pupils dilate. The dog wags its tail at his feet. It's ready, time to eat.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / 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. 
