An Entity in the Car

She said she smelled an entity in the car,
a stench of roadtrip left too long.
Like the broccoli stalk that bounced under the seat
on a trip to Chicago when she wasn't born.

It smells like fish, she says,
her nose wrinkling with a pug cuteness.
How could a decade and more pass
before she's this big and telling funny one-liners.

An entity, I laugh.
She smiles at her inside joke.

Probably not broccoli, I say.
It's her souvenir shell that smells,
a barnacled crustacean empty of its creature,
picked from the sand by a hand as big as mine.