Get out of here, you half-witted lackey, he roared at him and sent him tumbling down the steps. My lord, I've been breaking my back working for you through the summer heat, I need my wage to send my boy to school. With no chance of success, he got up, and with a heavy heart, he walked home on the dusty road. He saw him under the walnut tree - he was writing with a gnarled stick in various shapes only he could understand - and thought that the boy wouldn't be heading down the road of knowledge this year either. He called him and poured out his bitterness. It's all right, Papa, said the child, the school will still be there next year.
(Translated by Ana-Maria Batog / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / 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 June 2023, the group has 11,430 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. 
