One. Tell your boyfriend that you’re Bonnie and he’s Clyde. Show him the famous photograph, Bonnie leaning against the car, cigar drooping from her lip, gun in hand. Tap the photo and tell him that could be you someday. Don’t tell him how Bonnie and Clyde died: her typewriter and his saxophone in the car, bodies riddled with bullet holes.

Two. Impress him with facts, like how Clyde chopped off two of his toes to get out of work detail when he was in prison, or how Bonnie was exactly your height. Don’t tell him you’re tired of scratchy hotel sheets and greasy fast food. Say it will be fast. Over, done with, money in your pockets.

Three. Pick the convenience store in your hometown, the same one where the man behind the counter dared you to try a live grasshopper, their squirming bodies burrowed in the folds of the paper bag on the counter.

Four. Steal a gun for your boyfriend, the one your dad keeps under his bed and never uses. Teach him how to shoot. When he’s not looking, empty the bullets and slide them in your back pocket because face it, you want cash, not a dead body.

Five. Once it’s time, slip on masks. A fox mask for him, a tiger mask for you. Ignore your boyfriend when he panics, arms crossed over his chest, gun falling to the floor.

Six. Pick up the gun. Tell the cashier to take the dollar bills from the register and drop them slowly in your purse. Don’t think about how the cashier reminds you of your dad, or how he has a tiny, star shaped Band-Aid on his cheek like he cut himself shaving this morning.

Seven. Don’t think about the gun you hold in your hand, or how the last time you even thought about guns, you were in third grade and there was a shooting at the high school seven blocks away. Remember how you and your boyfriend bonded over your crappy, minimum wage job shoveling ice cream into cups and cones for shrieking children with grubby hands and runny noses who dripped liquified ice cream and syrup onto the floor, leaving behind a trail of scuff marks and sticky fingerprints.

Eight. Remember your boyfriend wasn’t always this useless, like how when you thought you were getting tendinitis, he stole a Ziploc of ice cubes from the freezer, pressed it gently against your throbbing hand. As you drive away, hands tight around the steering wheel, your boyfriend in the passenger seat, ignore the loud pop of a flat tire as if you’ve just run over a body in the middle of the road. As the police car tails you, don’t think about your pet chicken named Bonnie who was warm and sweet and fluffy and cooed in your arms, then was torn apart by the dogs next door, how all that was left of her was the dangling sinew of her eye.

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Candace Hartsuyker has an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. Her work has been published in Fiction Southeast, Fractured Literary, Cheap Pop and elsewhere.