Here, grab a beer. I'm a few years old and I listen to him blindly.The saleswoman knows me and looks at me with pity. He could've bought two loaves of bread with that money. He could've bought some bologna or milk with that money. My sisters didn't knowwe were eating out of pity of the neighbours. Dad spent all his hard earned money on alcohol and he would sometimes even beat me too. That's how I learned the value of money. One beer, two loaves of bread. One beer, 100 grams of bologna. One beer, our dinner. Years later, on the way to my mother's graveyard, I pass by our house. He calls out to me: Son, can you get me a beer? I bring him two loaves of bread.
(Translated by Raluca Ioana Crucerescu / 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. 
