three.
"Well, dammit," she says, slamming the widely spread map on the steering of her car, groaning.
After her phone's GPS was proven useless - by instructing her to turn right when clearly there wasn't any right conjuction for the next mile and crashing every now and then - which, for both misfunctions, resulted with her throwing of her phone on the passenger's seat floor and regretted it the moment after - she decided on taking a less conservative way and uses the huge map she bought at a nearby gas station instead.
That isn't turning out so well, either.
In frustration, she hastily folds the map back into it's original rectangular shape and tosses it on the passenger seat. After an hour of aimless driving, hoping and praying that every turn she takes is the right path, it dwells on Jade the difference of her surrounding.
Gone is the highway, yellowish long grass comes into view. Somehow in the chaos of her misfunctional GPS, complicated map tracks and her lack of knowledge of the route she'd voluntarily go to for an errand, she'd wind up in an old ranch with a dusted road of no vehicles except her hybrid.
A gutted feeling - of an atom bomb dropping - scorches the pit of her stomach, burning a deep hole in it. She's getting more worried as seconds passes and tall grass still traps her in.
"Are you kidding me..." she whispers and bit her bottom lip, a habit she does whenever she's panicky, nervous, worries or in this case, all three of them. Any sane person would've drive all the way back to where they started, but being Jade Miller whose always hoping for a brink of hope even in the most unlikely situation, she keeps on driving.
Those are the times where she hates being what she was.
"Okay, okay, I'm just lost. At least I'm still in the States, right? Right. Okay, no big deal." She grips tight on the steering wheel and closes her eyes, her heart wishes for a miracle to happen, so that when she opens her eyes, she'll be back on the right track, leading to the city of Northampton where the florist is located. But apparently, this life isn't a fairytale.
"No big deal," she mummers again, reassuring herself by telling a lie.
It is, actually, not a big deal - yet - because a few miles later, her beloved car breaks down in the middle of a stranded road with no living creatures around but Jade Miller, the yellowish grass, and flocks of birds that flies up in the sky.
"What the-" Jade says, heart thumping, as the car comes to a halt against her will. She keeps telling herself to calm down but her still sweaty palms shows otherwise.
Jade's car is a bright yellow Ford Fiesta that's almost perfect for her youth heart - easy to drive, excellent gas usage and comfy seats for four people - and as a whole, an almost perfect car for a long drive. Well, here's where the flaw comes in: it's almost too perfect for her that the thought of it breaking down in the middle of a long drive never occurs her mind and forces her to be unprepared for such situations.
With shaky mitten-covered hands and jelly-like legs, Jade climbes out of the summer colored vehicle and lifts up the hood, withstanding it with the prop rod.
Small puffs of black smoke come off the engine. Jade coughs and takes a few steps backwards as a reflex, waving her hand to fan off the smoke. After the smoke has faded out, Jade steps closer and takes a closer look at the engine.
As a girl with mere exposition of vehicles since she was little, gears and engines aren't really her thing. Besides the basic she'd learned from briefly flipping through a Top Gear magazine, she has next to none of knowledge of an interior design of a car, much of the insides of a car.
So as she stares at what's in front of her, her eyebrows knitted together into a crooked line, her mouth twitches, Jade can only comprehends a syllable of: "Huh?"
She reaches for her phone in the pocket of her jeans, only to realize that her mobile phone was sunk in the floor of the passenger's seat, where she had threw it earlier.
After retrieving her mobile phone from her car, hitting her head on the inner roof in the process, Jade hopes she didn't wreck her phone.
But there are much worse case scenario, like not getting enough reception.
There's only one silver bar that flicks on only when she holds her phone up like Lady Liberty, enough to make it out alive but not enough to make a call. She wanders off for a few metres ahead, swinging her phone up and down, switching it off and on again and again. The weather gets more crippling cold by every minute, chilling her already winter bone.
She gets in the car and tries the keys again. The car sputters, once, twice, before it dies. The coming happiness in her when the car sputters dies along with it. She tries it again. Nothing.
"Fucking hell, Goddamnit," she mutters.
Jade Miller barely ever swears, but when she does, it's nothing more than a simple "hell" or "damn" or "ass", and she makes sure no one is around to hear it. But this occasion is an exception, whereas no one is around. And she's beyond mad at herself.
Her car's heater isn't working, but the heat inside the small vehicle is enough to keep her body a little warm. She sat back, her hands in the holes of her sweater, her eyes on the side mirror, impatiently waiting for a car or a lorry or basically any vehicle with someone who probably knows how to fix her problematic car.
A few minutes later, an image of a silver SUV reflects on the side-mirror and Jade straightened up immediately. She pushes open the door and waves her hand, like she's waving for a taxi except with more arms as she motions at her car.
The SUV passes by Jade like the wind.
Jade sighs, sadly at first but she gets angrier the more she thinks of it. It's so obvious that the driver of the SUV saw her, calling out for help like a child drowning in the water, but they chose to purposely ignore her.
She kicks the front tire of the car and curses loudly. The stabbing pain feels like every bone in her right toe has snapped in halves.
Inside the car, she rubs her toes, the right heel of her leg perched on top of the seat. She stays in that position for a while, resting her cheek on the perched up leg.
When another vehicle comes into view, she climbes out of the car with a bare foot.
✥
Two MPV's, a coal trailer, a muddy tractor and a foreign couple that doesn’t speak English later, Jade Miller has almost given up on hope.
She tries pushing the car and turning on the engine countless amount of time, but the car remains still.
Jade has always thought that she'll die alone, and until this very moment, she might be right.
Slowly, she lies on the cold street, the thin layer of snow sends a bone-chilling sensation throughout her whole body. The tiny particles of snowfall rest on her face, numbing every inch of her face, her closed eyelids.
It’s an eternity or two later, when she hears the footsteps of boots frictioning against the snow-tapestried road. The footsteps pauses for a long moment that she thinks they’ve either miraculously goes away without making any noise, or they’ve stopped and is now standing near her, probably looking down on her. Or maybe it’s just her mind, manipulating it’s tired self, causing her to believe that there’ll be someone who’ll give her a hand.
Then,
"Are you fucking crazy?"
