He wipes his forehead, puts the shovel on his back, and heads home. Taking the short way, he passes by the Cold Bitch, where some young men had long ago forced a girl who was carrying food for the people working on the field. She was found the next day, stripped bare. The earth greedily swallowed all the blood. People say that you can sometimes hear a dull cry when you walk by it. Just stories, he had walked that road so many times and nothing happened. He quickens his pace. He feels someone pulling at the shovel. He doesn't look back. Another pull. He remembers the innkeeper's words: I'll be damned if that place is clean!
(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. 
