When I wake up and get out of bed, my muscles hurt like they do after a night full of sex. My buttocks feel like someone tightened them in order to knead them. Until I remembered nothing of the sort happened, I almost felt excited. If my joints were not also hurting and my sore throat didn't exist, I might have daydreamed a little bit longer. It's day 256 following the Apocalypse, as we call within our isolated group staying underground, and apparently the radiation only kills the humans and not the viruses that continue to do their job.
(Translated by Diana Pașcanu / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
