Write one perfect sentence, they ask, and I think: who determines what perfection is?

The nautilus, with its saltwater-born concentric spirals that echo the golden ratio may be a perfect crustacean… but that doesn’t mean this sentence is perfect.

Personally, I think a perfect sentence would be: Cheesecake has no calories.

But then I’d have to ask myself: does that fact that such a sentence expresses an untruth render it imperfect by default?

One perfect sentence…

Maybe it should have seventeen syllables, all stretched  out in a line like Hemingway wrote for warm-ups. “American sentences,” he called them. But while his work was wonderful, he himself was a horrible person, so maybe that makes him incapable of perfection? Or even of inspiring it?

Rain dancing across the deck sent small creatures scurrying for shelter.

I think that’s more charming than perfect, myself.

Or even cute.

It is a fact that as humanity has colonized other worlds, and formed communities on worlds with existing populations, their favorite food has spread into space with them, to the point that every world with a significant human population has at least one decent Chinese restaurant.

There. That’s perfection. At least to me.

Notes: For day 7 of The Literal Challenge‘s “Covid’s Metamorphosis” project. I’m woefully behind.