Render Us Rotten

A love story told in anagrams

Image credit: Nils Leonhardt via UnSplash

Render Us Rotten

That lousy goldbrick of a roustabout had it coming.

He cracked wise one too many times about the fish eyes, the scaled skin, the pointed teeth. Pirri—he was Pirri the Pirhana Boy in the freak show tent—well Pirri, he finally let him have it.

He’s about a head shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but he just punched the sucker. Upper cut. Straight to the chin. ‘Course it didn’t hardly do nothing and we were all scared for the kid. Thought he was about to get his clock cleaned. But when the rouster reared back to retaliate, Pirri just bit his finger clean off.

Wish I could’ve done the same. That handsy leatherhead threw his weight around in the hoochie coochie tent, too. All us girls wanted him dead, but a missing finger was close enough and a lot less trouble.

So I didn’t blame the boy. They made him out to be a monster, and you tell someone that enough times they come to believe it, don’t they? I outta know. You should’ve heard what those sumbitches used to call me.

Render us rotten and that’s what you get, couple a young kids who didn’t know no better just fighting for some respect, some dignity.

I think I loved him from the moment that fat finger hit the floor.

Endure Torrents

That summer we decided to leave the carnival and take off together. We stole one of the trucks they used to haul the canvas. ‘Course that meant the tent boss and the Col would do more than swear us out to the troupe. The police would be involved, but we didn’t care. Truck was almost dead anyhow. Figured we’d abandon it at some point, sooner probably than later. And by then we’d be as good as gone.

Turns out that same summer the rains came. And not just the usual summer storms. I’m talking rains of biblical proportions. Preachers on the radio were calling it the end of days. Everyone else was calling it Noah’s Summer, ‘cause most of the time you needed your own ark to get around. So we left the truck in a ditch outside Shreveport and waded into town.

Most everyone had up and left. Houses were wet right up to the ceiling. Pirri could swim like anything though, so I held onto his back and we just paddled right up to a place with a second floor and made ourselves at home. Nicest place I ever stayed, I’ll tell you that. I didn’t even care about the damp.

Pirri went out and got us everything we needed from the empty houses. Food and clothes. A knife. I knew it weren’t right, but I also knew what we needed to survive. We didn’t take more than that.

When Pirri got back, the rain was pounding down again. The flood waters were starting to make their way upstairs but we figured we were pretty well safe until morning. We listened to the rain on the tin roof, and we just felt young and alive and free.

We made love for the first time right there in that waterlogged house.

When it was over, I told Pirri I’d endure torrents for him. Torrents of water and torrents of shit and torrents of whatever life threw our way.

He smiled with his pointed teeth and bit my lip. Just a little, just softly. I tasted the blood. And then he kissed me. And I knew he was mine.

Tenderer on Ruts

We got used to being wet. I looked like a drowned rat most of the time. But not Pirri. He was made for Noah’s Summer. Skin like scales. It seemed to wake up in the water. To shine, like all this time it’d just been thirsty. His fish eyes came to life too, bright like the moon in swamp water.

That’s prettier than it sounds, let me tell you. And I would know. The swamp was our home. For a time.

After the house, we bummed our way down to the coast and found our way out into the bayou. Set ourselves up in a little shack we built from scavenged pieces.

We were good at that. Finding what we needed. Making shelter out of nothing but our hands and hearts.

And the swamp welcomed us. I think it recognized one of its own, could sense some part of itself had returned. It didn’t make things easy, but it didn’t make things so hard on us either.

Pirri’d go out hunting. Most of the time he’d just eat what he caught right out in the wild. But there’d always be something left over for me. Fish or rats. Sometimes a raccoon. I’d cook it over a little fire. I didn’t know what I was doing, but believe me when I tell you that nothing from the cookhouse at the carnival could compare. Not when there was a whole wet world full of life right outside our door and nothing to stop us from exploring it or each other.

Especially each other.

I had scars. Sometimes the boys paid extra and got to see me after the cooch show. Couple times they got rough, put their mark on me, deep enough to last a lifetime.

I didn’t like the look of the ugly things. Tried to keep them hidden much as possible. But Pirri, he made me think of them different. He brushed his fingers against those grooves and it was like he was taking a well-worn path home. He was a tender lover for all his wildness, and he was tenderer on the ruts, the furrows of my skin where he planted kisses like seeds.

Stun Need Terror

Noah’s Summer was edging toward autumn. Almost autumn in the swamp is something. If you haven’t seen it you really should. The golden hour stretches on so that the whole day seems to glow like a new penny. It’s as close to magic as I’ve ever seen. And it’s so damn pretty you almost forget about the danger. What lies beneath that black water.

Pirri went out hunting. I sat waiting for him at the edge of the shack, foot dangling in the water, watching the rain make a quilt of circles on the swampwater.

When my eye caught the shimmer of Pirri’s scales, my heart gave that little flutter, a firefly blinking out a love note in the hollow of my chest. He slipped through the water, cutting it like butter. And I was so focused on Pirri that I didn’t even see the second wake stretching out behind him.

A gator.

And then it slipped below the water.

And then Pirri screamed.

When I pulled him out of the water he was awake, but his eyes weren’t seeing. He was breathing but the kind of breathing that’s little and useless. The kind of breathing that don’t keep a person alive. I slapped him. Tried to stun him out of it. Tried to get him seeing again. Breathing again.

I needed everything. A doctor, bandages, anticeptic, morphine. I needed nothing. Just Pirri, whole and healthy.

I’d been scared before plenty. But not like this. When I saw what the gator’d done. The blood. All that red and pink and white. That was real fear. But when the light left his eyes? That was terror.

Return to Sender

I sat with him in the downpour. The tears mixing with the raindrops. My own version of Noah’s Summer right there on my cheeks.

I tried to think what to do. The dead should be buried, but the swamp’s no place for a grave. The swamp’s no place for a fire big enough to burn a body either. And I couldn’t leave him there on the rough wood at the edge of the home we’d built together even though that seemed like what I most wanted to do.

So I sat with Pirri and I cried for Pirri and I slept next to him one last time.

And when the sun rose the next morning and the rain calmed itself to just a mist and the water hanging in the air lit up with that swamp magic, I knew what to do.

I took Pirri into my lap, hugged him close one last time and then let him slip into the water. He lay there, and he looked right. Like the water was cradling him now that I couldn’t. Like it was his mother taking him home. Return to sender, you know? Giving the swamp back her son. And I thanked her for the time I’d had with him and then I watched the slow, gentle current take him away, inch by inch.

---

This post is a part of 2025’s TiF Presents…Return to Sender (A Valentine’s Day Writing Event). Each of section of the story is an anagram of the words ‘return to sender.’ I loved discovering the different ways the letters could be rearranged (using help from an internet anagram generator). The new phrases were surprisingly evocative, and it was great fun weaving a story around them.

Thank you to

Erica Drayton

and

Meg Oolders

for putting this event together!

Looking for another twisted love story? Check out my Frakenstein-inspired tale, A Heart Full of Teeth. And you can find my other dark fantasy and horror stories here, including the contest winner, The Echo of Gods.

Or maybe you’re in the mood for something a little longer? My serialized novel, Dark as Dawn, Bright as Night, is a literary fantasy with elements of horror, and you can find all the episodes here!

And if you’re all in, go ahead and subscribe below!