We stayed at the Three Bulldogs inn. The owner, a bulldog himself, in his fifties, rented rooms for thrill-seekers. We had come to film a documentary about haunted houses, while I was preparing my doctoral thesis titled "Cerberus, good pooch," although writing about Caragiale was tempting as well. While everyone laughed heartily at Bubico, I sobbed my heart out. So I made my choice. We filmed for several consecutive nights, we switched to the sniffing and pricking up the ears mode, until I saw him. He had flames on his tongue, melting a foreign coin. Freeze frame. Lights.
(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. 
