Why Max and Ying Decided to Make a Sex Tape by Eliot Li
Managing Editor Zoa Coudret on this week’s bonus short-short: “Why Max and Ying Decided to Make a Sex Tape” looks at love, sex, aging, and death from an indirect but powerful perspective. By keeping the focus on the lead-up to the titular event, Li exposes the silliness, excitement, and always-looming sadness of growing old with a romantic partner, and what’s at stake if (or rather, when) we lose them.
Why Max and Ying Decided to Make a Sex Tape
Because after becoming empty nesters, they took a filmmaking class, and learned about rule-of-thirds, racking focus, and shotgun microphones.
Because they discussed it with their therapist for the full hour. At the end of the session, she gave them her blessing.
Because in your fifties, the trajectory of sags and bulges rapidly accelerates, and Ying wondered if they didn’t film it soon, there just wouldn’t be anything worthwhile left to document. That’s actually wrong, Max said. You’ll always be attractive to me.
Because after thirty years of marriage, they trusted each other that the file would remain private and never be seen by anyone else.
Because they heard that after someone dies, the first thing you forget is the lilt and cadence of a person’s voice.
Because when driving back home from the clinic, where her doctor said Your white blood cell count is still climbing, and his doctor said Your coronary plaques are progressing, though nothing was imminent, they knew eventually one of them would die before the other.
Because with the right soft lighting and zoom lens, they could see the tiniest hairs on skin, above shadowy pores and a bead of sweat, so that the one left behind would remember, glistening, the taste of salt.
Eliot Li lives in California. His work appears in CRAFT, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. He's a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.
