An Excerpt from "Viscosity Breakdown" by Jason Price Everett

She had sublet some friend's intimate little boxlike pied-a-terre (what was her name?) in some hideous angular apartment building (what was her name?) somewhere along the sterilized nether stretches of the Boulevard Raspail (it might not have been Raspail it might have been something else and what the fuck was her name?) she was older than he was and he had timed it just right an evening out with the rest of the students summering at the university and as the less adventurous talkative bibulous types evaporated he allowed himself to get drunker and drunker more rapturous without actually becoming disjointed so much so that when he claimed to have forgotten the RER shutdown time and accidentally missed his chance to ride the iron millipede back to his suburban cyst of a room (no phone and riddled with cats) she believed him implicitly and offered to put him up at her place for the night she was drunk too on wine and conversation and she was a tall redhead and her cheeks glowed with the redhot malleability of her emotions and the glow was reflected in his eyes as he turned away to hide the twisted grin of success the first blow had been administered to her finely folded matrix sprinkled with dust of rubies: access.
He bought a packet of Gauloises Blondes at a tabac near the Metro station and followed her through the hollow junctions of the weeknight to her apartment she glowed the entire time she was tall not fat not thin she was defined by what she was not except for all that red he imagined her nether parts lit up like the power indicator on a graphic equalizer blasting out pink noise drowning out her fiancee deafening her to all save him and his purpose as they entered the apartment he found to his perplexed chagrin that her aged mother was visiting for the week couched in shock he chatted amicably before the sleeping arrangements were decorously calculated (he got the couch; she got her room; mother got the guest room -- enough taxonomy) he removed his shoes and lay curled on the couch like his missed train under the damp mossy rock of a roundhouse of expectation accurate on cue she flowed out to him in the dark he could see the burn she gave off on the back
of his retinas (rods and cones) she led him to her room and his forgeries were vindicated and his penis turned the color of her hair and his body turned the color of her body and everything was red in the clustered darkness of her narrow bed except the reflected chartreuse light of the neon sign crowning the chain drugstore across the street and four stories down.
She made him go back to the couch after they had finished in order to preserve appearances he went but grudgingly.


Jason Price Everett was born in Orlando, U.S.A., in 1972. After a period of study at, among other institutions, Lafayette College, Cornell University and the Sorbonne, he embarked upon a series of odd jobs. In a process that has lasted the better part of a decade he has managed to write and publish a dozen books, with matter ranging from short fiction to poems to travel sketches and criticism. His work has appeared in many small magazines and online journals, including The Circle, Hubris, Burning Angel and Si Senor. His last job was as a professor of English in Xian, China. He currently resides in New York City.