Orion Saint.

Fiction · Satire · Art

ORIONSAINT.

A little fiction. A different reflection.

Stories about the things we say, the things we mean, and the space between.

Discover the books

A Bulgarian writer & artist. South Florida.

New: DOG = GOD · Collected English edition ↗

Open a book. Leave a little different.

Featured novella
INCOMPLETE LINESA marriage, imperfectly translated.
01The book
A marriage, imperfectly translated.

Incomplete
Lines

About this book & excerpt ↗

A man trying to understand a woman.

Form
Novella
Chapters
23
Language
English

He translates instruction manuals.
She tunes pianos.
Neither has been listening.

When Vera leaves after a year of unspoken grief, her husband Teo approaches their marriage like a problem with instructions. A disastrous grand gesture, two private notebooks and her father’s piano gradually reveal what both have failed to hear.

A quietly funny, tender story about marriage, grief and learning to listen.

Turn the opening pages ↗

Chapter 1 · About 4 minutes
02New satire
The universe has excuses. Your landlord has a deadline.

Mercury Owes
Me Money

A Comedy of Cosmic Excuses

Three broke guys in Florida. One brilliant business plan: blame the planets.

Lou has overdue bills. Brad has a pitch. Denny has a clipboard. Together they sell $19.99 certificates proving your problems are the universe’s fault. Business looks promising—until the roof leaks and Mercury won’t pick up.

Featuring memberships that won’t let you leave, customer support that needs five hours to say hello, and shopping trips where you spend $173 to “save” $64.

Chapters
16
PDF pages
64
Language
English

Read with page turns ↗

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Complete English edition · Includes front and back covers · PDF, 9.2 MB

“The trash can was enjoying a better supply of vegetables than anybody in the house.”

Chapter 11 · You Can’t Afford These Savings
03Philosophical fiction · Bulgarian edition
An empty mirror. A life beyond the reflection.

Бог и
огледалото

About this book & excerpt ↗

God and the Mirror

She paints other people with tenderness. Her own reflection is harder to accept.

Preparing an exhibition, Elena begins to question the shame attached to bodies, age, and desire. A portrait comes down. An apology does not restore a friendship. Good intentions leave consequences.

A philosophical novella about self-acceptance, faith, and responsibility for the people we hurt.

Chapters
27
PDF pages
75
Language
Bulgarian

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Download PDF Open PDF ↗

Complete Bulgarian edition · Front and back covers · Pages for notes · PDF, 13.4 MB

04New fiction · Adults only
What remains when the rules fall silent?

The Temple
of Compliance

About this book & excerpt ↗

An intimate novel of power, trust, and choice.

A private world of precise orders. A connection that must survive beyond them.

Elena restores old books. Alex writes instructions and longs, sometimes, to stop being the person who supplies every answer. Together they build the Temple: a private practice with clear rules, clearer limits, and the right to stop.

When he says Yellow, everything slows. Work, distance, and a breach of confidence test what they have built. What remains asks more of them than obedience: the courage to be known.

Explicit, consensual femdom fiction. For adults only.

Chapters
26 + epilogue
PDF pages
157
Language
English

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Download the full book Read the PDF ↗

Complete English edition · 157 PDF pages · 152 story pages · Covers included · PDF, 4.8 MB

A few pages inside

Step into the gallery.

An empty room. A woman watching. A conversation that changes its shape.

Selected opening paragraphs · Original English text · 18+

05New fiction · Collected edition
DOG = GOD by Orion Saint: a scruffy black dog holding a golden ring, with a worn slipper at his paws, on a cream cover.
A human is a considerable responsibility.

DOG = GOD

About this book & excerpt ↗

The ordinary work of loving someone.

Steve thinks he has adopted a shelter dog. The dog has a different understanding of the arrangement.

His human needs regular meals, daily walks, less time on his phone, and company when the house goes quiet. Fortunately, the dog has experience with sitting.

A story of grief, unlikely friendship, and the small acts that bring us back to one another. Includes the novel, epilogue, and companion pieces.

PDF pages
124
Language
English

Read with page turns ↗

Download the book

Collected English edition · Front and back covers included · PDF, 5.5 MB

Orion Saint in a moonlit studio, with his face reflected in an antique mirror. The poster reads ‘Some doors open inward’ and ‘I choose freedom.’
A portrait, after dark.

Through the mirror

Some doors
open inward.

The mirror holds a face. The stories reveal what is behind it.

Between Sofia and Miami: art, words, and the freedom to see things differently.

View the portrait

I choose freedom.

SOFIA MIAMI

04

A few lines

At one and a half speed, his wife was fine.
At normal speed, she was not.

Incomplete Lines · Chapter 7

05The author

An eye for
the ordinary absurd.

Orion Saint is a Bulgarian writer and artist based in South Florida.

His work brings dry humour to the awkward places where language, grief, freedom and everyday life meet.

The drawings and the stories leave room for the reader.

Orion Saint

A LETTER WHEN THERE IS A STORY

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on the shelf.

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Through the mirror

Orion Saint · Original artwork in English

Orion Saint in a moonlit studio, with his face reflected in an antique mirror. The poster reads ‘Some doors open inward’ and ‘I choose freedom.’

Incomplete Lines

Opening chapter · English

INCOMPLETE LINES

ORION SAINT
Incomplete Lines

Chapter one

It’s Fine

Original English text

Teo Marin translated instruction manuals for a living, which meant that for nineteen years he had been paid to believe that words did what they said.

PRESS AND HOLD FOR THREE SECONDS meant three seconds. DO NOT IMMERSE meant keep it out of the bath. CAUTION: HOT SURFACE was not a metaphor. Teo liked this about manuals. Nobody had ever written one in a tone of voice.

On the Tuesday it began, he was at the kitchen table with a German document about a refrigerator called Kelvin.

Kelvin was a smart refrigerator. It had a camera, a microphone, a screen the size of a paperback and, according to page four, an emotional intelligence module. KELVIN LISTENS TO YOUR HOUSEHOLD, said page four. KELVIN NOTICES WHAT IS MISSING.

Teo typed it into English and frowned at it. Their own refrigerator was twelve years old and noticed nothing. It hummed in a low, hopeless key, like a man waiting outside an office.

The front door opened. He heard keys go into the bowl, the soft thump of Vera’s tool bag against the wall, the particular sigh of her boots coming off. Fourteen years of marriage had taught him the order of those sounds. He could have written the manual for them.

“Did you call the plumber?” she asked from the hallway.

“I said I would.”

She came into the kitchen. She was still wearing her coat. Her hair was pinned up with a pencil, which meant she had been inside a piano for most of the afternoon.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Teo considered the sentence. It seemed to him a perfectly good answer to the question. He had said he would call the plumber. The intention was on record.

“I’ll call him tomorrow,” he said.

“You said that yesterday.”

“Then it’s still true.”

Vera looked at him for a moment the way she looked at a piano that had been tuned by a cousin. Then she took off her coat and put the kettle on.

Vera tuned pianos. She went into schools, churches, concert halls, and the living rooms of people who had bought a piano in a hopeful year and never forgiven it. She carried a tuning hammer, a set of felt mutes, a small torch, and the patience of someone who spent her days listening to things that were very slightly wrong.

“How was the school?” Teo asked.

“The A was flat. Someone had put a vase of flowers on the lid and watered them generously.”

“Did you tell them?”

“I told them. They said the flowers were for the recital.”

“So you fixed the A.”

“I fixed the A. The flowers are still there. It will be flat again by Friday.”

He nodded. This was the kind of conversation he understood. A problem, a cause, an action, an outcome. It had the shape of page eleven, TROUBLESHOOTING.

The kettle began its slow climb. Vera stood with her back to him and her hands flat on the counter. There was a long silence, which Teo used to translate two more sentences about Kelvin’s crisper drawer.

“Teo,” she said.

“Mm.”

She waited. He finished the sentence he was typing, because it was a good sentence and he did not want to lose it, and then he looked up.

“Sorry. Yes?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s fine.”

He looked at her back. The shoulders were where shoulders usually were. The kettle clicked off. She poured one cup, then remembered him and poured a second.

“Are you sure?” he asked, because he had read in a magazine at the dentist that you were supposed to ask.

“I said it’s fine.”

Fine. Teo knew the word well. He had translated it hundreds of times. Fine: of good quality; satisfactory; in good health. In a manual it usually appeared in the phrase FINE ADJUSTMENT, which was the small dial you turned after the large dial had done most of the work.

He filed the conversation under satisfactory and went back to Kelvin.

Vera took her tea into the living room. She did not turn on the television. She sat by the window in the chair that had belonged to her father and looked at the street. After a while, Teo heard her lift the lid of the old upright piano they kept against the wall, the one she never had time to play. He waited for a note.

There was no note.

The lid went down again, gently, the way you close a door on a sleeping child.

On his screen, the German sentence said: Kelvin bemerkt, wenn etwas fehlt.

He typed: Kelvin notices when something is missing.

Then he took the cup she had made him, which had gone cold while he worked, and drank it anyway, because it seemed rude not to.