Although a slave, carrying the wounds of the vicious beating that he received throughout the years, he still believed in freedom. He'd heard about the war, about the democratic vision of Lincoln, about equality, about abolishing slavery, he'd heard a lot of stories. And he was gullible enough to believe in them. He fled north to enroll in the Union Army. He went through fire and saw with his own eyes the villainy of mankind, but he still had hope. Until the end. After the war, he went back south to work on the plantation.
(Translated by Georgiana Morozii / 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 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. 
