All Roads Lead to Blood by Chau Bonnie; & Bonnie Chau

Author:Chau, Bonnie; & Bonnie Chau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2018-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

Triptych Portrait With Doors In Closed Position

2016

The artist tells me to create a frame for my story. Be a master builder. Erect a steeple to the skies, supported by scaffolding that holds up a clearly defined, easily categorized shape. You can have just a beginning and just an end, but a middle, a core, cannot exist by itself. It’s defined by what surrounds it, what comes before, what comes after. A frame for your story will make it more palatable. It will be easier for your reader, your listener, to hold, to stomach.

I nod. I like this idea, of my story being something that needed rearranging in order for people to stomach it. An unruly story that needs to be tamed, enclosed, subordinated. Put a frame around it, show people where to look, show people that it is worthy of consideration, if not admiration.

I ask if I should frame the story with a wedding. Weddings are ripe. Family, friends, strangers, social mores, traditions, every kind of relationship, food, alcohol, dancing, consumerism, money, everything comes into play. Or what about a gathering in a kitchen or around a dining table? Talking and storytelling while eating or preparing food. That seems right somehow, centering around the essential base need for sustenance and company. The artist shakes his head. He’s more of a proponent of private, small-scale encounters. Mundane encounters with the known and unknown. Encounters with people and with other stimuli, like art. Stories that encounter other stories.

A story within a story within a story. Or, perhaps a triptych. I am more interested in a story on top of a story. A triptych painting kept folded shut.

I lie in bed between seven and ten p.m., looking out the window. I see a big bug, wonder for a second about the big bug, before it lights up. Fireflies outside my window. Nothing, light, nothing, light.

2046

In 2046, people would talk about how love used to be much slower. There would be time-lapse footage of a pale pink flower petal, unfurling itself in grainy slow-motion video, captions flashing across the bottom of the screen, saying just look at the wonder of life, look at the slowness of this woman, revealing herself. I’d have a job like researching old educational videos from the last century—most of them I’d be able to find digitized, though there’d be rumors of many that had been suppressed or “lost.” It is worth the wait, the time-lapse video would drone on, sans serif yellow letters blaring at your eyes, peeling down your lower eyelids. It is worth it, it would menace, the pink petal uncurling to a wider curl, un-arcing, throwing, ever so slowly, itself, its soft belly, to the puncturing of your pupils.

People would talk about how there used to be events called speed dating, in which many men and many women sat in rows facing each other, and rotated, usually the men did, every five minutes, they scooted their bottoms over to the next seat, for a next date, with the next five-minute woman.

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