He could see that we were packing up. He'd sit in front of the door, almost saying, you won't leave without me, got it? We had no choice but to take him along. He made us laugh and also got on our nerves. He'd run back and forth on the trails, he'd get tangled between our legs, knock over our coffee mugs or food bowls, and bring all the toilet paper from the forest in front of the tent. It made me want to kill him. We would shout after him when he darted away, but he had no reaction to our calls. His name was Pat, derived from patsy. When he died, he took our adventurous youth with him. He left us only with aging.
(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. 
