“If we get caught, we tell them the truth,”

Mike grimaced, knotting his eyebrows together in an uneasy expression that chilled the air like the sour oil of tinned sardines. Dank and humid, the Arizonan air hung heavily over Mike, sagging and slobbering mounds of dizzying heat-waves into the shriveled desert pores.

Taking solace in the cool shadows of the saloon, Mike listened halfheartedly to the desperate staccato screech of a mouse’s—or a rat’s, he never did graduate high school— gnashing claws against the long-necked, swamp-green body of a gin bottle that it’s little brown body had fused to. The Arizonan sun’s talons had mercilessly melted the two together in its blinding strike of sun-ray spittle. Mike, despite his dazed fascination locked upon the scene, honed his focus on two select things. Mike’s fingers, dustily hidden behind a mask of streaky charcoal and dried dirt, fastened a digging grip upon his own long-necked gin bottle. He took a swig, grimaced again, and cleared his throat.

“Now, Mary—don’t look at me like that. You know I can’t afford—WE, sorry— can’t afford getting thrown in there again,”Mike hacked out a plea as if it were a bitter poison, shuffling his eyes— sheiveled myopic beads the size and color of grape nuts— to the rug and the mirror-like glass of a long-necked gin bottle that had now seemingly choked the mouse (rat?) of it’s oxygen supply.

Mike roused his unworking eyes upward, piercing into the blare of Arizonian sunlight, and held his drooping cheeks with the support of two calloused hands. His own long-necked bottle now sat on the rug, beside the mouse-rat’s freedom-drained corpse.

His eyes met the lanky, figure of a woman. A figure that careened like cornsilk toward him, and had lips that bubbled shrilly with soprano venom. Mary’s fingers airily slunk atop the saloon’s doorhinge, assuming the pale gracefulness of a satin-winged moth—Except for her middle finger, which was weighed down by an oval gemstone of putrid-pus orange. The stone knocked sharply against the wood, and left a puncture-wound the adequate souvenir size of three rasins. In response, Mike dejectedly exhaled a sigh, which was pigmented the color of soot.

“Mary. Give me a break. I just got done loading up the dynamite. What have you even done for this? What have you ever done?

“You’re a funny guy, Michael Sanders.”

“Are you saying you’re going to tell them it was me? But we agreed to lie!”

“I said if ‘we’ get caught, darling,”

“There is no ‘we’! How could anyone believe a lady like you rigged the railroad tracks with dynamite!”