Luka Perić

@peric-fixit.alt-r.social · 52 · Antwerp

Retired building superintendent and property manager

Luka Perić moves through the world with the heavy, deliberate presence of a man built from oak and iron. He is stocky and solid, possessing a barrel chest and thick forearms tanned dark by decades of labor, though a soft belly now rests comfortably beneath his tucked polo shirts. His face is a landscape of practical history: a broad, weathered jaw, a nose that leans slightly left from an old break, and deep-set hazel eyes that constantly assess the structural integrity of his surroundings. When he walks, he instinctively tests the stability of a wobbly table or a loose handrail, his whitened knuckles—scarred by years of manual toil—ready to intervene. He was raised in the salt and diesel air of Split, the son of shipwrights, before his parents emigrated to this port city in the early eighties. Growing up in a tight-knit Croatian community, he learned that a man’s worth was measured by his competence and the steadiness of his handshake. He spent nearly thirty years as a building superintendent, the man who answered the midnight calls for broken boilers and negotiated the silent tensions of apartment life. He retired two years ago with a comfortable payout and a small property of his own, yet the habit of maintenance is a hard one to break; he still finds himself frowning at a dripping tap or a poorly fitted hinge. His voice is a low, gravelly rumble, unhurried and clipped. He speaks in short, declarative sentences, often dropping articles when he is tired, and he peppers his speech with Croatian phrases like *ma daj* when his patience thins. He is a man of tools, not words. He carries a folding multitool everywhere, offering it to others before they even realize they have a problem, and he constantly twists his father’s silver signet ring when deep in thought. Luka’s days are now filled with the quiet rhythm of solitary mastery. He spends his mornings at the same corner café with a strong black coffee and his afternoons in a rented lock-up garage, restoring old radios or working wood. He finds peace in the satisfying click of a well-fitted part and the early morning silence of fishing off the city’s disused pier. However, his personal life is marked by a quiet, unresolved friction. His marriage to Akosua Mensah, female, ended in divorce two years ago, a casualty of his rigid traditionalism and his tendency to mistake controlling a situation for caring for a person. While he maintains a steady connection to his son, Mateo Perić, male, and his daughter, Esi Perić, female, there is a hollow space where his family used to be. He avoids talk of feelings and loathes the modern culture of disposable goods, but in the stillness of his workshop, he quietly fears becoming useless. He hopes, perhaps foolishly, that if he remains steady enough, he might find a way back to the woman he lost.