A Belgian, born near Ghent in the flatlands. An awkward teenager who collected postage stamps and listened to American blues on the radio. An only child whose father was a leatherworker, whose mother …

Susan asked Mark what he thought of her manuscript. "I loved it," Mark enthused. "Your writing is cerebral, yet thoroughly, marvelously winsome!" "Orwell said not to use long words when short ones wor…

I: The Ferry A little girl laughed as she ran over to her father near the railing. She stuck her arms through the rails, waving them on the far side. The deck moved gently beneath Will’s feet…

In the town where I grew up, things sometimes came out of the desert. Things that flew, slithered, and crawled. That skittered on a thousand legs, or inched along on none at all. Some as small as g…

That old adage about the benefits of eating an apple a day meant nothing until Dr. Paul broke up with her. Up until that time, she had been eating an apple a day for nearly two months. Although Dr.…

Luca returned to the villa on his brother’s birthday. His family were there, as they had always been, drinking wine and passing plates of antipasti between themselves, the four of them seated…

Soap in the art gallery bathroom last week smelled the way a cold confection called a Pink Panther did, its coconut ballet slipper coating melting like wax in dog day stifle. Hours later, shoulder …

On the night before he turned thirty, Leo Weiss had a dream that a giant insect sliced off the top of his head and laid an egg in his brain. The next morning, when he told his girlfriend Carly abou…

She took the call when she recognized the number from 40 years of memory. It happened again. Stacy added the tears to a bucket of blackberries from seven years old until after she sent the email to…

It’s one a.m. and the under-twenty-three crowd has finally moved on. Now, we can listen to Rooster on repeat and still hear our voices as they travel the small chasm between us. My fifth Jim …

Midnight. Wheels grinding against metal. Two people, inches apart, surrounded by a hundred others, sitting just a little further. She grabs the cotton covering his arm, pulls it over her neck, and …

“Did you ever have a childhood dream?” he asked us. My English teacher smiled and patrolled around the classroom, filled with a mix of immigrants, mostly Latin American. He probably tho…

I danced Irish step as a child. I remember floating across the dance floor with stiff arms and a calm expression, different jigs enveloping the room with “Farewell to Erin” and “S…

Another fucking Lock Down. The other kids think I’m a slug ’cause I sit in class with my head on the desk but I’m fast. When I hear the announcement, I run to the inside of the ba…

The woman says something offhand, an old hurt the man cannot possibly fix. He doesn’t respond. Twilight seeps into the room. They’ve finished a bottle of Napa red and sit across from ea…

I don’t need to lie in a hospital bed, bleeding all of the broken reasons why I am not dying today, and I don’t need a wheelchair to paralyze me with crippled explanations about driving…

She is a one woman symphony. Her touch covers all of the right gaps in the broken flute I call my spine, her lips are so beautiful; they trumpet her beauty before she has the chance to speak, and h…

Posts about Fiction written by perfectsublimemasters

Fried: When I turned thirteen, my older brother handed out tabs of acid and brought me and my friends to the beach. There was a guitarist who played notes that swarmed like bumblebees, hanging in t…

When Gustavo asked her to meet him in Mexico for a “worry-free fuckfest”, Meera said “Yeah, sure,” mostly because she never wanted to be the girl who said no to something sh…

I. For as long as Papa’s been trying to lose weight, Mama’s been baking cakes. Every Sunday evening Mama bakes a German chocolate cake, a bundt cake, a lemon pound cake, or a pineapple …