Nocturne in Soil and Smoke 

Odelia Wu

My best friend’s boyfriend is driving us back to our Airbnb high in the foothills of Colombia’s Caribbean coast and we’re going fast because he knocked back a few too many Caipirinhas at dinner. The world outside the window is a tenebrous smudge, one of Whistler’s nocturnes, and the needle quivers somewhere between 170 and 180. I don't know the conversion from kilometers to miles but I know it's fast. So fast that the road ahead disappears, it’s just a line we leave behind in the dirt.

The truck we rented runs on diesel and he’s really excited about it. He makes us roll all the windows down so we can smell the exhaust. I’ve been telling her to break up with him because I think he’s clingy and pathetic—traits that are aggravating in a girl but unforgivable in a guy. She laughs at this and rests her soft head on my shoulder because she knows I’m projecting.

But now the fumes are getting to me or maybe I took something I can’t remember and the neotropic night clings to my skin and the Andes tower like the demiurge stretched thin and eternal against the horizon. In the rearview mirror it’s like I'm seeing him for the first time, hair a wild black mass but face completely placid.

I know if I called his bluff he’d rev up hard and we’d go soaring off this precipice and evaporate against a shoreline of metamorphic rock. I’m still learning what love means. In the back seat my thighs are sticky against the leather and my chest contracts with a heavy sigh of relief, knowing she’s in good hands.

Odelia Wu is a writer from New York
@chronically_injured