At the end of the harvest, after he got off the tractor, grandpa would get his share. He managed to get away from the Security, the Militia and the Frontier Guards for years and years without being deported. Some started to catch on, they even called him the
Chiabur[i] after one night he had secretly slaughtered a cow in the basement of the dispensary. He had said he'd helped with a birth, but the second day his mouth smelled of steak. He was a cunning man who loved his family. He had a very clever saying "Where there's no head, there is CAP
[ii]. And they do not forgive, they collect everything that gets in their way."
[i] From the Turkish kibār, a rich peasant, a term often used in Romanian literature and history (with a negative meaning during the communist regime).
[ii] A play on words, in Romanian head = cap is pronounced the same as the abbreviation C.A.P. which stands for Cooperativă Agricolă de Producție = Agricultural Production Cooperative which were prevalent in the 20th Century throughout the eastern communist regime.
(Translated by Jessica-Polixenia-Cristiana Copilaș / 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. 
