Marin Smith
No One in Mexico Uses Coolant Anyway
From the cliff, the whales are specks drifting across a vast, silver eye. We’ve followed them south along Baja, and will try to catch them as they birth their calves in the bay of San Ignacio.
Had we come a week later, we’d have missed them.
You and I, we are rebounding, like the whales—our mid-twenties a helpless migration to and from the balmy shores of home. As we watch the whales, I sag from my own endless curve of swimming.
Back in your car, barreling south along with them, we roll down the windows. You drive fast, the wind covering our silence.
Suddenly your hands grip the wheel at ten-and-two, your eyes fix on the dash—together we watch the temperature pin rise. In the rear-view mirror, ominous liquid stamps the ground like a blood trail behind.
“Fuck,” you mutter, breaking to a stop, opening the hood, and peering in.
“It’s the coolant,” you say, “we’ll have to use the jug of water in the trunk.” I nod, as if I understand.
For the next twenty miles, we drive, watching the gauge until it screams too hot! You stop, pop the hood, I get out and pour water in the coolant tank, and we drive a few more miles. A limp across the desert.
“No one in Mexico uses coolant anyway,” you say, as if we can go on like this forever.
When I left you several months later, I cleared the entire apartment, leaving no sign that I’d ever lived or had even been there. I took out the trash, made the bed—things I’d rarely done under normal circumstances. It was an act of love, I thought, to erase my wake.
I only knew how to reject a person fully. No matter that there must have been some good and attractive qualities to draw me to you in the first place. No, I must have been hugely mistaken, seeing something that wasn’t there. I had to make you into a giant exaggerated smear, one easy to reject, because I was rejecting was a made-up thing.
I remember still, that night in Baja, how at nightfall we finally parked your broken car and propped our tent along an inland pond. Bullfrogs bellowed hideous songs all night—a soundtrack to our temporary trajectory, our migration through landscapes and each other.
Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and life enthusiast. She has an MA in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her work has been published in MER Literary, Milk Art Journal, Literary Mama, Dead Flowers Poetry Rag, Considering Disability Journal, Elephant Journal, Thought Catalog, Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, and forthcoming in CALYX Journal and West Trade Review. She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Abraxas Review.
