heartbreak in c major in an oklahoma cowfield

You’re more machine gun than human.

Bloody knuckles white on a no-frills steering wheel. 90 on the speedometer, 100, 110.

Being with you is like putting the muzzle in my mouth and hoping it’s not loaded.

The warlike convulsions of an engine about to swoon.

Where are you going, Jinx?

A 90’s Jeep Cherokee the perfect shade of venomous careening off the quiet road to a soundtrack of nocturnal trap and creative swearing.

Jinx Cassidy was in a cowfield.

Even in her adrenaline-and-strobelights state of mind, this struck her as funny, or at least gratingly ironic, because Jinx Cassidy didn’t belong in a cowfield.

Jinx Cassidy, recent ex-runway model.

Jinx Cassidy, habitual freelance street fighter.

Jinx Cassidy, fallen from city skyline grace.

Her world wasn’t cowfields.

But her world was one now, because the veteran Jeep might as well have been booted to the ground for all the moving it would be doing in the near future. Engine like a heart attack, Abel had said. He always was a slut for a metaphor.

It was a crappy car. She was attached to it in the way a junkie is attached to things that won’t really make them better.

Jinx fished her spiderweb-cracked phone from her pocket and punched in a number she’d called more than once. She didn’t bother turning down the music. In a screaming match between heavily autotuned drug laments and the contents of her brain, she was backing the bass.

The receptionist for the tow number gave her an ETA tailored for the middle of nowhere. She hung up. Her windshield was filled with a star-bitten sky. She closed her eyes and leaned against the headrest, pulse pounding in her throat just a touch faster than the beat.

“If you really loved this car, you’d stop actively trying to kill it.”

Jinx didn’t open her eyes. “Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder. Octave Mirbeau.”

Rhiannon was the filtered beams of sunlight that shine through your window and make honeyed patches on the floor. You don’t notice exactly when they show up, or exactly when they fade away. Always when you aren’t looking.

Jinx Cassidy, schizophrenic with unreliable medication tendencies.

The passenger seat was silent beneath Rhiannon’s weight, and though Jinx’s eyes were still closed, she knew she cast no shadow in the moonlight. They were all just a little insubstantial, her only reminder that they weren’t actually visible to non-schizophrenic eyes, and that her vaguely eerie brain had conjured them all up. It was a constant road trip into the uncanny valley, but she’d come to trust their faces more than those that cast shadows. Rhiannon had no tear ducts. This was funny in the fact that Jinx had, on multiple occasions, seen her cry.

Rhiannon snorted. “You’re fight-high, distraught, and just wrecked your car, and you’re quoting at me. You’re a caricature of yourself.”

“Whatever. I need to drink.”

The alcohol in the trunk of the car was equal parts inside joke and burned bridges. When Jinx left her parents’ house for good, she took some souvenirs for the road. She wanted them to feel her absence, and stealing out with their prized Scotch and Civil War-era wine from countries overseas from the Civil War seemed like a concrete place to start. It wasn’t like they didn’t have the money to buy more.

Jinx sat on the hood of the car and sipped a college tuition-priced Italian red straight from the bottle. Rhiannon sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down and toggled the radio dial around until she found something brooding and feminine. She was a casual fan of Amy Winehouse.

Sometime in between, Jude became a resident of the back seat. Jude had no veins where veins should have been. This was funny in the fact that Jinx had, on multiple occasions, seen him bleed.

None of the figments of her imagination ever left footprints.

Rhiannon argued in a rapid-fire, lightly French accent, with the cadence of a hotheaded Italian chef berating his subordinates. Jude was a man of few words, and those few words were reminiscent of the stoner boy who only comes to English class. The Cherokee’s interior was a storm of Italian chefs and stoners fighting between Amy Winehouse and the White Stripes. They were good company, not scary at all. She supposed she’d be seeing a lot more of them, now that Abel was over-full of her.

Jinx was drowning.

She had been drowning for some time.

Jinx didn’t want to be awake anymore.

That was a recent development.

Jinx usually made a habit of spitting blood in life’s face. “I can’t beat the world,” she’d once said to Abel over the rim of a beer bottle, “but in fighting, I sort of do, don’t I?” She was drunk. It made no sense. That was the first time he’d kissed her.

She had either kissed or punched everyone she knew in Oklahoma. Abel made up the kissing division, and he lived life in phases. Moving to Oklahoma had been a phase- a “removing ourselves from the masses,” he’d called it. She’d followed him, because the kissing/punching situation was similar in upstate New York, but with a lot less kissing and a lot more Cassidy family. And because she’d follow him anywhere.

His tattoos had been a phase, and he hadn’t had money to remove them. Jinx had thought she was the only thing that was forever.

Alone. Implausible. Bored.

If she couldn’t have neon lights, she’d take the red of blood. And now even blood had lost its color. She looked up at the stars, and she saw a vast expanse of cold lights that couldn’t care less that her name was really Jennifer, and she’d told Abel it was Jinx on a whim, and that had been the first step away from her slow but thorough death at the hands of inherited white-collar conformity. Didn’t even know. Jennifer said the model in the Garnier ad, the voice at the front of the plane, the founder of a company you read about. Jinx said, “I’m not smiling because I’m nice.”

I have fallen out of love with life.

Jinx took a swig of wine. Some cicadas and some wind made the low, warm type of noise that spread not only around you but through you. The air smelled like cows and wildflowers, but she wouldn’t know. She didn’t breathe it in. When she lowered the bottle, a little girl was sitting next to her.

Jinx didn’t flinch. New ones weren’t all that common at this point, but they weren’t unheard of. Sometimes they only appeared once. Sometimes, like Rhiannon and Jude and Eleanor, they became like her psychological cats.

The girl had huge dark eyes set on a herd of cows a stone’s throw away. Jinx stared at her profile with her head slightly cocked, her face unchanged. Even her notable curiosity was being smothered by a pillow named memories of Abel. The kid was fawn-like, willowy and dark-skinned, with a halo of tight black curls that shone like a raven’s feathers in the moonlight. Her feet were bare.

“Iris,” Jinx decided out loud. She looked like an Iris. She was glad the new apparition was a girl. Hardly anyone titled songs after boys’ names. “Jude” had been an obvious choice, really. “Hey Jude,” the Beatles. What would she name the next male? Mr. Brightside?

Iris kept looking at the cows. When she spoke, her voice was like the space between a declaration of love and the answer.

“Would you die in this cowfield?”

Memories of Abel fell away, just a little, and let a flutter of shock flit through. “What?”

Iris turned to look at her full in the face. She had tear ducts. She was blinking, but less frequently than what Jinx figured was average. “Right here, right now. Would you pull the trigger?”

Jinx didn’t answer immediately. Her hallucinations did not typically ask her questions that made her reevaluate her own brain and by extension, them.

Iris went on. “Surrounded by cows. Looking up at the stars. It would be easier.”

Jinx hated that word. Easier. Easier was a small death with every utterance.

Easier was compromises, and ambiguity.

Jinx breathed out. “No.”

This answer surprised her.

Many people are uncomfortable around small children. Jinx was one of these people, but not discriminatory in her reasoning. Broadly speaking, any dealer of unflinching, soul-sifting stares was not her favorite. Her soul did not want to be sifted.

But since Iris came from her head, it seemed she got a pass, and Jinx crossed the border between antsy and entranced.

Iris’ mouth quirked. She was completely void of the creepy-crawlies trapped under most kids’ skin, and was almost uncanny in the way that she moved only when she needed to. She flicked her eyes to the cow herd and whistled. Jinx no longer heard Rhiannon and Jude’s bickering, and she wondered when they’d fallen silent. The radio was still on, but very low. Rhiannon had won.

A cow was walking toward them. A bull, more like, the kind with horns.

A bull was standing in front of the Cherokee. He was larger, far larger than what was expected, and he cast the car in shadow. His eyes were chocolate-colored and somehow achingly pure. And yet, he was power. Jinx decided instantly that she was enchanted by him.

He was close enough to reach out and touch.

“Look at him,” breathed Iris. “His horns are so terrible and his eyes are so good. Do you recognize him? You should. He’s you.”

Jinx didn’t object, though her hard exterior was one of her most prized possessions besides her ruby-studded engraved knuckle dusters. Instead, she reached out and touched the bull’s velvety nose.

”Someday,” continued Iris, stroking the hair around its eyes with fondness, “he’ll grow old and sick. Or get attacked by a mountain lion- they’re common out here- and poof, gone.”

Jinx turned sharply to look at her. “Why would you-“

Iris cut her off. “When that sickness or that mountain lion comes, do you think he’ll waste one moment not fighting?”

In the bull’s eyes, Jinx saw a resounding “no.”

She echoed it.

“In the meantime, do you think he’ll lie down and let the moss grow over him in anticipation of that sickness or that mountain lion? Will he ever let life make him any less than his fiercest, or stop enjoying the journey just for the sake of the journey?”

Jinx’s heart, which had long since stopped beating, sped up. “No.”

Iris smiled sadly. “Then why should you?”

There was a vacuum in Jinx’s chest. There was a pair of headlights, the first in ages, carousing down the empty street.

A seen-better-days tow truck with a vivid red Carl’s Tow and Oil decal pulled up by the side of the road.

A beefy man stepped out of the oil-hued rig. “You the broken down Jeep?”

Jinx affirmed and hopped off the hood of the Cherokee, swaying for only a second. After explaining briefly to the man, whose nametag matched his decal, she returned to discreetly check on the newest.

Iris was gone, temporary as a heart palpitation. The bull was wandering. A series of bare footprints lined the soft dirt beneath, heading directly to the cow herd. The rest was late-night shadows.

As her car was loaded onto the back of the massive truck, Jude and Rhiannon appeared beside her. They had brought Eleanor from wherever the figments went when they weren’t in Jinx’s line of vision.

“Who,” rasped Jude, “was that? New member of Jinx and the Figments?”

Jinx breathed in. She looked up at the stars and saw a sky full of faces that would know her name. “I don’t think so.”

You are so very unready for me, world. How I love you.