He sat on the bed and smoked a Dunhill from the carton that he had purchased in the duty-free zone. She extracted belongings from the room and put them into a valise. He marked the jut of her collarbone; it seemed to glow like a bridge cantilever in the dull light of the afternoon window.

"I don't think this can be salvaged," she said. Her fingers shuttled distractedly along the smooth plastic contours of her Orthonovum dispenser.

"One less foreign national," he said. The situation resolved itself. She called the concierge to arrange transportation to the airport.

The thud of tear gas canisters striking human flesh outside accompanied the transit of her hips across the room. It was a burlesque of violence.

His order of battle was drawn upon his interior topography. His emotional revolution was a series of military maneuvers recited to the chatter of Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachineguns in the Lionel-Groulx metro station. Recited to the unearthly beauty of the songs of Brautigan's tigers as they devour Longueuil. Recited to the thunder of flak above Mount Erebus. Recited to Laibach's "Geburt Einer Nation."

Three days of solid evening. The never-changing sky loomed in monochrome over the city. Small showers were from time to time detached from this ominous canopy. These fell with the sound of armored treads creeping slowly and stealthily over asphalt, in harmony with the daily rounds of the enforcement squads.

He lay prone on the bed. His penis was in her mouth. She provided suction in an ongoing series of repetitious motions. She approached oral sex as if it were stenography. The semen of his ejaculation composed spermatozoid texts of indecipherable content over her tongue. His ejaculation and the rain outside merged, became indistinguishable.

She went to the sink and spat. She rinsed her mouth twice. He lit a Dunhill.

"How do you say 'thank you' in Turkish?" he asked.

"Tesekkur ederim," she said.

"Tesekkur ederim," he repeated. "How do you say 'good night?'"

"Iyi geceler."

"Iyi geceler."

Time spun out like the filaments of an intestinal parasite.

"How do you say 'I love you?'" he asked.

"Sinesevyorum," she answered vacantly.

"Sinesevyorum," he repeated.

He walked along the rue Ballard near the hotel. He smoked as he studied a photograph. It was of her and himself at the barricaded checkpoint near the old Insectarium. He thought he could detect the false promise of 1960's architecture in her smile. The broken curve of the remains of the U.S. Pavilion traced the outer circumference of her left breast, taut against the artificial fibers of her blouse. All of these structures were artifacts of a future that would now never occur. The hollow message still inherent in the remains of this obsolete future saddened him. He thought of the Columbus space station, the Hermes shuttle, last year's violations of the Antarctica Treaty. He longed in vain for the resurrection of the Cold War.

He stood on the balcony. Faint haze partially obscured the rotating fires over the autoroute interchange near Brossard. Distance telescoped into blanketing sadness. The elongated afternoon crept into night. He saw a vision of the gutted Parc Olympique, the charred stadium a ravaged variant of his own half-erect penis; the old velodrome was exposed to the sky, a civic chancre. The occupation rustled faintly in the undergrowth of the dying city. Solitary figures stalked the anachronisms of the Yellow Line. The cracked carapace of the U.S. Pavilion hovered above a cheval-de-frise of trees shattered by rocket blasts. Antarctica burned. Armored personnel carriers slid along the rue Notre-Dame. Eno's "Music for Airports" played. He sensed her, her face superimposed over a map of the Dorval runways. Her body shifted configuration as she put out her hand to dim the light. It was one hundred years after the Exposition.


Jason Price Everett was born in Orlando, Florida in 1972. He was Educated at Lafayette College, Cornell University and the University of Paris. He has held twenty-seven different positions of employment to date, one of the more recent being that of English professor at a university in Xian, China.

His first book, Unfictions, was released by 8th House Publishing in 2009. His collection Hypodrome: Selected Poems 1990-2010 will be forthcoming from 8th House in the fall of 2011. His work has appeared over the years in such diverse publications as Si Senor, Hubris, CRIT Journal, The Mad Hatters’ Review, BITEmagazine, Writers Notes Magazine, Farmhouse Magazine, The Quarterly Review, The Prague Literary Review, City Writers Review, Riverbabble, The Maynard, Underground Voices, BLATT, Brand, The Alchemy Review, Carcinogenic Poetry, hardbrackets, Interrupting Infinity/Third Party Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Magazine, Ronin, Revue M**è**tropolitaine, CV2 and the Show Thieves Anthology of Contemporary Montreal Poetry. He currently lives in Montreal.