The Bayou Sisters Saga: A Story of Love, Corporate Evil, and the Extraordinaire Bayou Family by Andre Michael Pietroschek - HTML preview

Prologue -> In Poetic Freestyle Snitching ith The Bayou sisters indeed are Queens of Hearts,

and when fed yummy Hot Dogs with fried onions, w e

the ladies also excel as Queens of Bubblefarts.

Mankind's corruption gets the planet killed, ted ffic

yet we should have much more bad blood spilled.

Yet, who am I to judge lovely Snuggles Bayou;

As I couldn't help stem that tide of toxic poo! iO ea

The water is everything when you’re below it. Not metaphorically. ob

Literally everything: pressure, temperature, the electrical pulse of living M Cr Chapter 1: The Water Knows things moving in darkness, the chemical language of predation and hunger, and home. The bayou at dawn is a language Snuggles has spoken since before she had words for speaking, since before she had a mouth that could form human sounds.

She surfaces first, eyes emerging like periscopes, gleaming in the

pre-dawn grey. The water breaks around her snout. Sniffles follows, more cautious, her massive body creating only the barest ripple despite her size. They move in patterns established over decades, a rhythm of companionship older than any human relationship, older than sisterhood

in the way humans understand it. The third surface is barely a ith disturbance: Bubbles, youngest, restless, hungry in the way that hasn’t yet learned patience.

Around them, the bayou is waking. Not to the human consciousness as w e propagated by our corrupted sciences, of course, but to alligator knowledge. The warmth rising from the water. The vibrations of movement in the shallows. A heron, early. Fish in the channels. Life and

death happen in the ancient way, simple, honest, and necessary. ted ffic Bubbles tastes something wrong in the water.

It’s not language, not exactly. It’s the way alligators know things: through iO ea

sensory data so rich it becomes emotion. The water has changed. Cr ob There’s a sharpness to it, a chemical note underneath the brackish smell of healthy bayou. Petrochemical. That’s the human word for it. Snuggles knows it from her mother’s journals, from the vocabulary of poisoning.

Sniffles tastes it, too. She moves slightly closer to the others, a gesture M that might be reassurance or might be alarm. Hard to say. Alligators don’t do comfort the way humans understand it. But they do communicate, and communication can feel like care if you’re genetically predisposed to hold your family close.

The hunt begins, as it always does. Movement in the shallows, a small

fish, panicked, moving toward deeper water. The three sisters shift position with synchronized grace, a predatory geometry of bodies converging. Bubbles is faster; hunger makes her reckless. She snaps. The fish is gone. The water clouds briefly red, then clears.

It’s not evil, this. It’s not mercy either. It’s simply what they are: predators ith in an ecosystem that depends on predation. They eat what they need.

The system balances. Or it used to balance, before the human systems w e arrived.

Snuggles hears the boat engine first. Her hearing, even in water, is

sensitive to the frequencies of human machinery. She makes a sound, ted ffic not a growl exactly, but a vibration through the water that carries meaning. The others respond instantly. The hunt is abandoned. They move toward deeper water, away from the sound, away from the visibility

of the approaching human world. iO ea

But they don’t go far. Not today. Today, they move to the shallow banks Cr ob where the water becomes waist-deep, where the transition is possible, where they can choose to be something other than what they are.

The transformation begins. M It’s not quick. It’s not clean. Bones crack and reform, skull restructuring, spine extending and compressing in sequence. Snuggles feels it first, as always, feels the way her body remembers how to hold a human shape. Her teeth shift, the grinding noise only she can hear internally, the sound of evolution backwards, of biology choosing a shape it wasn’t quite built to hold. Scales ripple and soften into scarred, weathered skin.

The gator-strength remains in her limbs, but gentles into something that

can manipulate objects, can hold tools, can grip a pen to write reports that no one will read.

Sniffles transforms second, more smoothly. Her body has practiced this ith a thousand times. She’s held the human form longer, adapted faster. Scientists call it epigenetic memory, the way some bodies remember ancestral shapes. She thinks of it as a lie she’s gotten very good at

telling. w e Bubbles is last. Her transformation is always the hardest. She’s never wanted to be human the way her sisters have. Her body resists the

shaping, wants to spring back into the form it was born into. She can feel ted ffic scales trying to push through her skin, especially at her hairline and along her arms. The hunger stays sharp in her chest, harder to suppress in human form. She grits her teeth, human teeth now, blunt and

insufficient, and forces herself to breathe through it. iO ea

By the time the sun fully breaks, three human women stand in the Cr ob waist-deep water. Their eyes are still slightly too reflective, still holding that alligator luminescence even in human irises. Their skin is too scarred, weathered beyond what their apparent ages should allow. But

to human observers, if any were nearby, which they aren’t, because the M sisters are careful, they would appear to be women of no particular importance. Fifties, maybe. The country weathered. The kind of woman you don’t look at twice.

They’ve had decades to perfect the illusion.

Snuggles, who holds that name because her mother gave it to her,

because names persist across forms, because some things are more essential than biology, stands with water dripping from her shoulders. Her grey-streaked hair is matted to her skull. She looks tired in a bone-deep way, the kind of tired that comes from holding two

incompatible shapes with the same body. ith “We’ve lost three more nesting grounds since last month,” she says. Her

voice is lower than human voices should be, carrying harmonics of the w e vibrations she made underwater. “The Canal Four site is gone. The chemical spill covered everything. The eggs are dead.”

Sniffles, the one who documents, who measures, who believes that ted ffic understanding can create change, wades deeper into the toxic water. She kneels, her jeans soaking, and pulls out a small testing kit from the waterproof bag she’s rigged to her belt. Human tools for measuring

human destruction. iO ea

“The pH readings are already off the scale,” she says. Her voice is Cr ob different from Snuggles’, higher, faster, the rhythm of someone used to speaking in meetings where words must be precise and quick. “And the temperature. Something’s been dumped here. Something hot.

Something that shouldn’t be.” M Bubbles, who hasn’t slept in the human form for more than a few hours at a time, who wakes up tasting mud instead of morning air, who is always half-feral even in her human shape, stands with her hands clenched. The nails are too long. She doesn’t file them down anymore, can’t quite manage the fiction of grooming. Her eyes scan the poisoned water with something that looks like hunger, yet is actually rage.

“Fuck the readings,” she says. Her voice is the harshest of the three, still

carrying consonants that sit wrong in a human mouth. “I could taste it. When I swam through the Channel Four intake yesterday, I could taste what they’re putting in our water. Death. That’s what it tastes like. Chemical death.”

The three sisters stand in the water, the liminal space between their two ith natures, the place where they belong most fully. The water is rising,

though. The water is being stolen. The ecosystem is being murdered by w e people who’ll never understand that they’re committing a genocide, that alligators aren’t monsters but witnesses, aren’t pests but family, aren’t resources to be extracted but beings with interiority, with memory, with the right to survive.

Snuggles puts her hands on her sisters’ shoulders, one on each. It’s a ted ffic gesture that might be comforting. It might be a plea. It might be the only

way she knows how to say: we’re still together, we’re still whole, we’re iO ea

still family, even though everything is ending around us, even though the water knows and we know, but nobody else will listen.

“We need to get dressed,” she says finally. “The day is coming. We have Cr ob jobs. We have lies to maintain.”

Sniffles and Bubbles nod. They’ve done this ten thousand times. They M know the ritual. They know how to move from the water to the bank, how to dress in the clothes they’ve hidden in waterproof bags, how to smooth their hair and try to look like women who’ve never felt the expansion of lungs filled with water, who’ve never known the clarity of predatory hunger, who’ve never understood their own nature as fully as they understand it at dawn in poisoned bayous.

But first, before they leave the water, there’s a moment. Just a moment.

All three sisters stand still, their eyes closed, their faces tilted to the rising sun. And in that moment, the water holds them. In that moment, the bayou remembers what it was before humans arrived. In that moment, there’s no difference between alligator and woman, between

predation and protection, between what they are and what they must ith pretend to be.

Then Snuggles opens her eyes. The moment breaks. w e

“Come on,” she says. “The day won’t wait for us.”

They emerge from the water, all three of them, leaving the poisoned ted ffic channels behind. But the poison is inside them now. It’s inside the water. It’s inside every ecosystem they’ve ever known, every form they’ve ever

inhabited. iO ea

The water knows. It always knows. And it’s telling them something Cr ob they’re not quite ready to hear.