'The Day I Skipped School' - Free sample story from just-released horror collection, The Devil Took Her
Susan and Tsuru, two lonely introverted high school girls, find themselves unexpectedly bonding as an ordinary morning of skipping school descends into something awful.
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The Day I Skipped School
Susan and Tsuru, two lonely introverted high school girls, find themselves unexpectedly bonding as an ordinary morning of skipping school descends into something horrifyingly awful―something they’ll bury under mountains of memory across the next decade, desperate to forget.
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1.
Tsuru, the Japanese goody-good girl, is sitting at the front of geography class and I totally want to throw darts at her back, or a knife, blades, needles. Just something to ruin her perfect posture. So uppity and show off-y, like she’s a different species, her white polo shirt sitting perfectly on her statue body. Her hair is shinier than mine, her eyelashes thicker; her bra is newer and sturdier, her tits harder than everyone else’s. This school is a write-off, and we all wish we could stay away, and it’s frustrating that Tsuru seems oblivious to the shithole her parents have enrolled her in.
The mean girls from my class throw a Green Rocket towards the front of the class which crumples as it hits her back. It’s a paper dart with boogers in it. Tsuru feels the snotty plane tap her spine, shivers once, adjusts her shoulder blades, continues to absorb the lesson, acting oblivious.
Bitch. Fuckwit. Dumbass moron. Girls’ High sucks balls, Tsuru. The least you could do to, like, raise the level of dignity is give us some push-back by reacting when we hassle you, girl. Jesus. Things are different where she comes from, I suppose. Tsuru is from Japan. Her mum is a grumpy lawyer, and her dad is an accountant for the Japanese embassy downtown. I saw them once, and they looked frightened of the world, walking in front and behind her, protective of Tsuru like she was a little baby bird. The protectiveness just made it worse, at school. Kids still call her Slanty or say “Love you long time” or biff condoms at her and she doesn’t say shit.
Our class right now is geography. It’s boring as hell. Ms. Bowker is tapping the whiteboard where she has projected a map of the world, showing all these exotic locations, Polynesia and Easter Island and Tierra del Fuego and shit, talking about human migration and blah blah blah, Koreans have more Neanderthal DNA than the rest of us, and the land bridge from Asia to Canada, and how Japan’s Crane Wife fairy tale was transported to the Aleut people of Alaska through continental drift or some shit, cultural memetics, and the Kamchatka people, and the Kodiaks and….
I’ve tuned out, honestly. I have two things to care about, hunched in my corner: I care about hiding my manga comic under my geo book, and I care about Connie and Francine and Hannah not fucking with me and stealing it. ‘Uzumaki’ is this super-violent seinen comic about a curse that’s taken over a Japanese town in the form of a spiral. It pulls people’s heads into vortexes or vortices or whatevver, curls people’s spines into ropes and stuff, bends people like a cinnamon rolls… . It’d be super-awesome if the Uzumaki curse hoovered up Connie and Francine and Hannah’s three-headed bitch-dog trio and contorted their faces with agony, let them know what it’s like to suffer. Sitting midway down the class, far enough away that Ms. Bowker can’t hear them, the Cerberus bitches are planning a keg party, and they’re discussing the invite list loud enough for Poppies and Losers to hear if we’ve made the cut. I know I’ll be on the Pop list because I play my way through the ranks, I put in effort to not-be-a-loser so I can survive school, throwing out strategic compliments and lending the bitches money and giving them cans of Rockstar energy drink.
Honestly though, I barely keep my head above popular water. I’ll go to their party if they invite me, but I literally hate crowds. My idea of a good time is sneaking out of school to throw rocks at the windows of an old factory or wandering by myself round an art gallery of naked drawings, something that’ll really give my parents reasons to fret over me. Or breaking into the basement of Mr. English’s big white house and looking for an old lamp with a genie in it. Yeah, that’d give me the thrills I need. Al English is the saggy-necked almost-60-year-old silk dressing gown-wearing Jaguar-driving creep who hits on me every time I accept one of his smokes when I’m dawdling in the alleyway to get to school slower. Mr. English stains my day every time his yellow alcoholic eyes touch me. I’ll be kicking through drifts of leaves in the alleyway then find myself accepting a cigarette while he rests his fat frog throat on the fence, breakfast cocktail in his right hand, stroking the cord of his dressing down, bragging about how his property management business has, like, a thousand clients, how he gets to spend all day in his slippers, how many kids he’s put into this world, how dating is better than ever in his 50s, how his pescatarian diet gives him increased “virility,” whatever the fuck that means. The gross old paedo just starts my day dirty, that’s the point.
Ms. Bowker’s voice cuts into my daydream.
Since we’re talking about cultural traditions in Japan, she goes, “Caaan anyone tell me the tale of the Crane Wife?” No one puts her hand up, so Ms. Bowker claps her hands together and goes, “Alrighty then!” with her big dumb enthusiasm and begins explaining.
“There was once a gentleman who randomly stumbled into a relationship with a woman—it could’ve been any one of you girls! The woman in question was, in fact, a crane disguised as a human. The hero of the tale didn’t know this at the time, bear in mind. Now, to help her man make money and keep him happy, the crane wife plucked her own feathers to weave a silk brocade, which the man sold. Their lives increased in affluence, girls, and d’you know what? Everything was going swimmingly… . Swimmingly, that was, until one fateful day.”
“Scuse me, miss?” Hannah has her hand in the air. “Just wanted to say: Connie looks like a crane with her bony white ass.”
“Oh, shut the ACTUAL fuck up,” Connie responds, and the girls start laughing and fighting.
Tsuru swivels her head and half her body to study the Pop girls. Just a little swivel, as if her parents will be notified if she turns away from the teacher for half a second. It’s not the first time I’ve seen Tsuru study us, looking down her curious beak like she’s an eagle up in the canopy. As she turns, her skirt rides up her thigh. I can see etched lines, like a barcode of scar tissue. Places where she must’ve accidentally—holy shit, she’s a cutter! Damn, I never thought Tsuru would be the type. My eyes are fixed on the notches in her thigh. I can picture the right-hand slicing into the pure, soft bulge of flesh. Two-inch slices at a time. Consistent, evenly-spread cuts. Yeah girl. I feel you. Space the cuts consistently so a girl knows she’s got control over something in this shitty world.
Me? I’m a slicer, too. I make a notch recording every cold criticism from my mum. I’ll show her someday, too. Look what all your rules and critiques and going on about getting a boyfriend made me do, Mum.
“LADIES.” Ms. Bowker claps. “Seriously, now, girls, I haven’t finished: let’s see if we can’t squeeze in the ending. Now, according to the legend—”
BLIIIIIIIIIIIING. The bell is ringing above Ms. Bowker’s head, making her hair shake. We become a tsunami of green skirts and white shirts, crimson ties, swinging bags. Tsuru is nearly sucked into the hall as the class pours out until she comes too close to Francine, who pulls the bag off Tsuru’s back and rifles through it, helping herself to exotic Japanese perfume, and to Tsuru’s panda pencils, plus her calculator, which looks like it’s worth money.
“Thank YOU!” boss bitch Hannah Kitchin pipes, as if it’s been a fair exchange.
“Pleasure, anytime,” Connie adds, lifting a bank note out of Tsuru’s purse.
Francie blows a mocking kiss. “Konnichiwa, skank.”
The bitches dissolve into the river of shirts and skirts flowing out to lunch. I want to catch Tsuru’s eye and let her know that I don’t approve, this isn’t right, the girls in my seinen comics would fight back, surely?
Tsuru’s eyes will probably ask me why I didn’t stick up for her, though, and I don’t have an answer, so I melt into the river myself, flow into another depressing day, wishing I’d had the guts to not to come in the first place.
*
I’m skipping school today. The fog is heavy as a wet blanket and it’s probably going to rain, my skin is dewy and my breath is white and I don’t know where I’ll go. I just know school is a miserable prison and it’s safer to stop midway up my street and not take another step closer.
At the end of the grass berms, where my street’s slow trickle pours into the going-to-work traffic torrent, I can see the rush hour rat race of people in their cars, bumper to bumper, glinting in the morning moisture. They don’t notice me. I’m just some skinny 16-year-old nobody who secretly cuts herself, thin enough to disappear behind the cherry trees and the autumn mist. I could’ve crossed the road, could’ve hovered on an island, then proceeded to school to wince my way through the day, hoping Connie and Co. don’t notice me.
But nah, I’m not doing all that. I’m not doing geography today, not learning ethnic folklore, not watching the clock while I poke my leg with a compass to stay awake, not wading through a choked hall of lookalike bitches. I’m walking a mile back down my posh, leafy street in the opposite direction from Girls’ High. Where am I walking? God knows. All I know is I’m definitely skipping school.
That’s me, yup. A total rebel. Princess Leia, Joan of Arc, Tay-Tay, Boss Bitch, fucking . . . Beyoncé. I’m turning firmly around and making a plan to go back to my parents’ house. If Mum’s car is unlocked, I can steal some of her parking coins and go buy cigarettes and candy and maybe a bottle of cooking wine if I show the clerk my pierced nipple.
All I need is to zig from tree to tree through the fog, zag between a couple of parked SUVs speckled with dew, and duck down outside number 1807 so Mr. and Mrs. Khan’s security camera doesn’t record me and tell my dad.
I start with a few steps. Them I’m fully in it. After five minutes, I’m a full-on ninja.
I scamper under the cameras and flagpoles and high gates of 1753, 1725, 1619, make it as far as 1609 when I realize the white shirt/green skirt uniform that looks like a mirage is actually—Oh, please God, no.
It’s her.
Tsuru the Exchange Weirdo.
And she just waved at me. Fuck.
I know next to nothing about this goth/Lolita bitch, except she is probably a snitch, and I’m going to get found out.
I press my back against the fence of a property called Silver Lining Lodge which looms over a slim alleyway. I melt into the privet hedge and try catch my breath. Tsuru should literally not be here. Last thing I need right now is witnesses.
I hear the hoof of her black leather boots clopping towards me like a damn Clydesdale.
The clocks stop and she’s there, in front of my hedge, wavering like a video game character waiting for you to hit Start.
I move forward out of my scratchy bush.
“Fuck are you doing here?”
“Hi,” she says, shyly moving her hair behind one ear, and adds “Soo-sin,” as if saying my name is a separate thought.
It’s SUSAN, yo, I wanna tell her. Except I like the way she says my name delicately, as if the texture is fresh on her tongue. Soo-sin.
No one else says my name like it’s special.
“I’m not—really, I don’t—” I have no idea how to end the sentence. I don’t live here? I’m not really cutting class?
I gulp, push my own hair back and go, “So, you going to school, or… ?”
Tsuru blushes, pours her face into her hands. Suppresses a snicker, a giggle. I can tell she’s struggling to formulate an explanation. Bitch has got a naughty streak.
“You’re cutting class, right?” I continue, painting over her nervous silence, making things less awkward. “It’s cool. Me too. I mean, unless you’re just late, or… ?”
Tsuru is nodding like a woodpecker.
“I guess we can hang, I mean if you’re not, like, getting a ride or whatever.”
Our bodies clearly want to walk somewhere; it’s just that one direction would take us to school, the other direction would take us to my place. We hover on the lip of the alleyway. We have the mist to cover us, for now.
“You guys are at number 1400, right—the place with the little checkpoint control box guard-thing? Your family, um, fuck, what’s the word . . . I don’t speak your . . . listen, is your people’s place safe to hang out at, or—?”
We talk it over and work out it’s a No to Tsuru’s house, and a No to mine, too. I can disarm the security system at my parents’ place, but the problem is I can’t erase the CCTV footage that gets fucking beamed to my parents’ goddamn mobile phones telling them I’m being naughty.
A car comes, black and glistening, a Mercedes. I find my hand crumpling Tsuru’s shoulder as I pull us into a closet of privet to hide.
We watch the car cruise past. Headed towards a purpose, unlike us. We haven’t even thought up something to do with our day.
We need to think, plot, plan. Lay out a mission.
I guess we could call an Uber, except my dad pays my credit card bill so he monitors all my transactions, and I totally know he’ll snoop.
Tsuru finally motions for us to scuttle to another alleyway between 1599 and 1601, an alleyway I’ve dropped many a bottle and butt in, though the problem is this alleyway goes past the house of—seriously? Please God, no—
The house of frog-throated property king Al English.
We don’t have a choice.
*
His gate opens smooth as a fridge door, closes cleanly. His yard is all paving stones and bird baths and sculptures of white cherubs. A fountain, a pond, lily pads, a pergola with roses, a hammock… .
Tsuru has a cute backpack of that puffy panda/cat beast Totoro. Just past the gate she kneels, opens it, pulls out a pack of smokes, a stolen-looking bottle of brandy, some men’s razor blades.
I spot a trio of comics in there. Bio-Meat. Ichi The Killer. Uzumaki, the one about the deadly spiral. Unless Tsuru’s gone and shoplifted in my bedroom, I think this crazy bitch has got the same taste as me.
“We fill, yes?”
“What, fill your backpack with Mr. English’s shit? Like, rip him off?”
Tsuru is nodding and about to blurt something when I spot Mr. English and stick a finger against her lips. Sssh. Time to roll the old rich fuck.
He’s waiting at the top of the stone stairs. Must’ve seen us out in the alley looking directionless. He’s stirring his coffee and finishing a conversation on his Bluetooth headset. Black lizard eyes under squares of uniformly-caramel skin like he’s had skin grafts or plastic surgery. The hair on top of his cooked pink head is squelched down with some kind of sticky wax, though it springs out of his chest in fuzzy curls.
Sure, I’m concerned about getting tongue-raped and manipulated, but we have to be off the street so Truancy Services doesn’t tackle us. Being in a rich guy’s house with shag carpet and a dark-wood spiral staircase with a library and a drinks cabinet is relatively okay, I guess.
He presses the device in his ear, says “Girls, top of the morning to ya,” as if it’s totally not unusual for teenagers to appear in his front yard. He waves us in, walking behind presumably so he can get an eyeful of our asses. He locks and bolts the ranchslider behind us. We sit on his hard leather couch while he puts Pop-Tarts in the toaster for us. He mixes us a drink each in a martini glass. I’m bunched up against Tsuru, sitting so close that the barcode-scars on our thighs press together. I glance sidelong at her, sitting upright and anxious. Tsuru’s lips are nervous, puckered pin-points. They need to be kissed, I think, weirdly.
Mr. English is away talking smack, roaming the parlour and kitchen, mentioning five or six times that we’re welcome to help ourselves to the champagne he’s put in the ice bucket on the coffee table.
The ice cubes in his glass clink as he paints with his hands.
“. . .Aaaand that’s when I realized the wisest thing to do is acquire tranche number three, considering the all-time nadir in volatility, you’d be an imbecile not to, know what I mean?” he says, settling into an armchair with his third drink, folding one knee over the other, adjusting his dressing gown over his fat thighs. “We all remember what happened to prices in oh-eight, obviously. But enough about my passion.” A smile leaks across his face. His eyes crease until they’re black lines. “Tell me, Ladies: tell me what gets you off.”
Tsuru’s eyebrows are so high up, I’m worried they’re going to burst out the top of her head. She’s been given a glass of stinky schnapps, but she doesn’t know where to put it. “I am liking . . . swimming in the ocean?” she goes. “When this is warm water, is warming?”
“My daughter, Annika, she was swimming at Summer Bay four years ago and she—” Bent over, he’s melting, warbling, warping, like water is falling through his body. Pinching his nose, bottom lips shiny with moisture . . . Jesus. The dude’s crying! And rolling forwards out of his chair, knees on the floor like he’s praying to Allah! What the fuck? I’ve only taken one bite of my Pop-Tart and already the day’s an abortion.
I was hoping to get propositioned, kind of, or robbed, but here me and Tsuru are, side-stepping African statuettes and Javanese idols to get to an old caveman hunched over in a half-somersault to rub his back and cheer him up. Tsuru is murmuring soothing things to the creep. We share a gaze, then our heads turn mutually to the wine rack.
Tsuru unzips her backpack. I begin filling it.
After a minute, the drunk, hairy, dressing-gowned wreck looks up from his puddle of tears on the carpet, startled, shocked, seizes Tsuru’s wrist as she tries to step over him and grab the champagne. “Take me to my room. Down those stairs. Please. You have to.”
He snatches both our forearms. We have no choice but to park our bags of loot and help him up. The guy is shorter than me and his pale-yellow throat bulges like a fat frog. He says, “The Burgundy,” turns and grabs a bottle of wine and a corkscrew and has a final glug of blood-dark stinky alcohol before we let him descend the few steps to his sunken bedroom.
Bronze wood panels. Thick carpet. Mirrors above the bed. Low ceiling, like we’re on a yacht.
The sheets we peel off his California superking waterbed are rich black silk. We urge him into the sloshing bed, and he hands his Burgundy and corkscrew to Tsuru. She studies the objects she’s been handed. She looks like she’s never used a corkscrew before. Its point is so sharp that it twists into a needle then disappears.
“Cheers for having us over, I guess.” I ask Tsuru a question with my eyes, like Why are we still here, this guy’s a drunken loser, what are you hoping for?
“Tsu. It’s first period. We’ve got to cruise. Right?”
Dumped on the bed, Mr. English is lying on his back, smiling, teeth sticking out over his lip like an alligator. He doesn’t look upset any more. His eyes gleam in their wet pink patches.
I shouldn’t be standing this close to his bed.
He snatches my wrist, crushing my white shirtsleeve.
“Nurse,” he says, yanking. “You have to look after me.”
I splat into his bed and the covers close on top of me, and even though he’s shorter, Mr. English is twice as heavy as me, squishing me as he rolls on top, licking and nibbling and sucking my throat, pushing my hands against the headboard.
In the mirror on the ceiling, I watch the sheets slide off his furry black back as his legs push my knee-high socks out to the sides, starfish-wide, his arms mirroring mine, keeping my hands pressed away from his eyes so I don’t claw him. I don’t scratch or scream or bite. My brain’s still half in the alleyway, stunned. Still thinking I can control what’s going to happen in my day.
Mr. English pulls his lips off me, leans back, shrugging out of his dressing gown, tugging at the elastic band of his boxer shorts, revealing a stripe of veiny blubber as he begins to yank his undies over one leg. There is a pen in his neck, suddenly, a silver pen I’ve never noticed, or it’s grown there just now, a pen or a torch or a crank, something with a black plastic handle, sticking to his froggy throat-sac with black paint, no, dark-purple blackcurrant juice that spasms, squirting across the room. Blood, dark as ink. Dripping down the cupboard doors thick and slow as barbecue sauce.
Mr. English falls backward off me and kicks, fingering whatever’s stuck in his neck. His crusty toes bash my chin and I bite my tongue. I roll out of bed, clutching my school uniform against me like armour, too breathless to scream. Tsuru reaches to pull the corkscrew out of the man’s neck. I slap her hand away, shove her towards the exit. We pause, turn, watch him struggle. Mr. English’s legs push away from wherever he thinks the corkscrew is. He kicks himself off the bed, lands heavily on the corkscrew side. He speckles the carpet with a dozen dark puddles as he tries to stand, one hand on the flap of his dressing gown, modest. He gropes his neck but can’t grasp the slippery corkscrew handle between his stained fingers. The corkscrew is deep, almost inside him. Buried.
“Ambulis,” he croaks. Bending, folding, sitting on his butt in a pool of oil spreading so thickly there are little ripples and rapids in the blood. His eyes attempt to meet ours, but they’re flicking in two separate directions.
“You fill bag.”
While I’ve been frozen, Tsuru has gone up to the kitchen, brought down wine carriers and canvas shopping bags, as well as her fluffy Totoro backpack.
She dumps the sacks at my feet.
“HEY. Filling bag, NOW.”
Mr. English gurgles, tries to crawl towards us through the red sticky swamp, hairy bum in the air as if he’s pretending to be a worm.
“Ev-e-rything,” she orders me.
“Is he—is he dead? He—he—he—can’t be— ”
“EV-E-RYTHING. SOO-SIN. BAG.”
I scurry up to the kitchen. We open another liquor cabinet. I stuff two sacks with Bacardi, Jim Beam, VSOP, Courvoisier. I toss in a silver cheese knife, a mortar and pestle, steak knives, a candlestick, postage stamps, a restaurant voucher, a meat thermometer, think think think, girl, what’s gonna make you rich? What do you need, what will you regret not taking? Thinking, grabbing, shit, um, this china plate, yeah, fuck, dropped it, pour out the parking coins from the fruit bowl, yeah, a metronome, okay, weird, car keys, a crystal ashtray, a letter opener, a butter dish, fuck—
I’m so busy stacking bags of loot by the ranch slider, preparing to escape into the alleyway, that I realize I haven’t seen my friend in minutes.
I freeze. Cold shiver. Fuck was that noise? A hand cracking walnuts? No. Somebody ripping a fish in half? No. Water balloons smacking on concrete? Wet, tearing, dripping, juicy. Splatty-crunch.
I tiptoe down the three carpeted stairs to Mr. English’s sunken bedroom. I peer around the corner. I see a pelican, yellow beak thick as half a kayak, too large for the room, hunched under the ceiling, pulling off chunks of red-stained robe and gulping them down. An enormous seabird, giraffe-sized, crammed in a tiny space, bumping its head, beak like two surfboards, eyes black frisbees. Its wings are white curtains stained grey, bunched, quivering. Its rear end spans meters, reaches into the en suite bathroom. Tail feathers big as paddles.
The giant bird twists its head to pull a chunk of flesh inside it. It has Mr. English’s arm in its beak. A webbed grey foot like a rubbery stingray is clawing, holding Mr. English’s body while it pulls him apart, beginning with his left arm. His free hand is trying to hold on to a bedsheet. He’s looking at me with drowning eyes. The pelican-thing makes the choking, sucking sound of a blocked vacuum cleaner then gulps the arm into its mouth, sucking up the black silk sheet like a napkin, and Mr. English’s head disappears. His shoulder blades are folded and squashed as he trickles headfirst down its sticky throat. After his shoulders, it swallows his back and belly, his hairy butt, his butter thighs. I watch the shape of his body stretch the gullet of the bird.
Lastly, the cord of his dressing gown whispers, flaps, as if asking us to fetch help, then the slippers fall from his toes as he disappears.
The bird chokes, pulls, swallows, and when it has finished swallowing, it turns to me. Its eyes are my equal. It knows who I am.
Big Bird. Big Bird from Sesame Street. Big Bird with black eyes. Big Bird with a mouth of stiff plastic. That’s what its beak looks like as it talks.
“Now you’ve seen.”
The giant bird’s cheeks flex. As it swallows, its eyes blink, huge and slow. Eyelids of skin from elsewhere. From a dimension of sea-bottom beasts asleep in the deep.
My scream tears the air in two.
The bird stomps, revolves, grunts. Its head smacks the lampshade. How—-how—how did it even get in? Pelican, yes? No? Heron. Stork. Swamp-bird. Eater of snakes and tadpoles and—sad—sadlonelydesperatedeserve—
“Susan. Promise you’ll keep me secret.”
“I pr—pr—promise.”
I back up the stairs, leave my bag of kitchen loot. I rattle the ranch slider ’til I’m screaming and throttling and praying and the ranch slider handle breaks and I sprint down Mr. English’s garden stairs, slipping on expensive white stones, gasping as I bump over a gnome and it shatters and I leave my heart throbbing behind me.
Tsuru appears from somewhere, dropping a computer monitor in the goldfish pond, her fingers tense like claws as she catches up and grasps my shoulder, sacks of loot rattling at her side.
My school bag, heavy with rattling metal and stone.
We sprint to my house, shower together, put our clothes in the washing machine, set the cycle for 8 hours and hide under my bed. We cry and bite our knuckles, weep into my mum’s belly, watch my dad thump the wall and turn away, wait for detectives who never come, watch the news for reports of Mr. English missing, read his obituary in my dad’s Property Investors Federation newsletter, slowly return to school. I have a skeleton of steel, now. A hardness in me.
I sit beside Tsuru every class and let her lean on my shoulder and whisper and when Ms. Bowker tells us to get a room, I tell her to go fuck herself, challenge her to a one-out. The same week, I push Connie into a pile of desks, hold a sharp pencil against Francine’s eye, crush Hannah’s scalp in front of 50 girls in the hall and scream in her terrified face, “I ain’t afraid of nothing no more, specially not you, you bully-bitch-cunt-FUCK,” laugh and pash, sip vodka from our drink bottles in the toilets, accept a bundle of correspondence school papers, battle my exams lying on my bedroom floor sipping alcohol and popping Prozac and bleaching my hair and listening to Baroque music and studying, sending secret forbidden texts to my BFF, and I realize, opening my university results one morning two years later, wondering how the fuck I got an A+ for accounting in the first place when I resent keeping records and remembering things, I realize I’ve drifted down a river of time far from where I used to be, and my counselor has taught me how to ground myself, how to stop letting people rock me off my perch, and I realize it’s safe now; no more cognitive distortions, no more hallucinations, no more waking up at 4am whimpering. There is no monster chasing me, and there probably never was.
I can stop running.
2.
College is fucking lit. On our first night, the Finance Society puts on a Burning Man party with a scarecrow stuffed with straw. They light the thing up and all us accounting and commerce kids rip off our clothes and dance in our bras and panties, playing beer pong and chanting anthems and throwing coconuts full of beer, tearing up our student loan contracts, pashing strangers, climbing the registry building, pissing off roofs. We party and study and blow up condom-balloons and scream at the future We are not afraid.
Summer, we get a break, and my heart rate slows. A lot of the girls are off getting with boys, but I’m not really focused on cock, nor is my best friend. Out at the beach, me and Tsuru toss our clothes into the wind and stomp through bitter green waves, shrieking, nipples hard as marbles. She’s still shy, still perpetually running away, hiding, retreating, and I tackle her from behind, force her into the dark sand, hold her down as an icy wave tosses pebbles over us.
In autumn there’s Pumpkin Fest, and we dance on the stone bridge in the middle of campus ’til our feet ache. At night we watch speech bubbles of white emerge from our mouths, linger in the black, frosty, twinkling sky. There’s a party in Hamilton Hall, and as we drunkenly stumble to it, I tell Tsuru “Wait—wait—wait!” and pull a mouthful of orange juice from her backpack and a mouthful of vodka and tell Tsuru that she is one Ooooooooorganized Bitch, Organ, Tee Hee Hee, Orgasm, Huge Throbbing Organs, and Tsuru rolls her eyes and marches up the stairs, and she’s so pissed off at my rude Western white girl ways, she tries to get away from me. The bitch can’t help but be polite, though, that’s her DNA, silly Tsuru, all mild warnings and soft threats so she’s knocking patiently on this party door and tapping her foot passive-aggressive until I catch up and begin massaging her shoulders, and I smell her mango-y shampoo and sneak a little drunken nibble of her earlobe, and she tilts her head left, inviting me to nibble again. The hall is ours, the hall is OURS, WORLD, SO FUCK YOU and I don’t want any passengers sharing my drunken ship, but the hallway is spinning and the party door opens and we fall inside, and there’s candles flickering by an open window and wavering curtains like ghosts and jazz on the speakers and an amaaaazing gathering of bitches, yeah, Thingie-Blue-Hair, the reporter from the . . . student newspaper . . . thing, and—and—and Kate, oh, Kaaaate, Kate Smirnoff.
Chertoff, she tells me. You’re loaded, Suze.
Takes one to know one, I tell her.
Connie—we’re friends now, fuck her, needy bitch—is whispering in Tsuru’s ear over by the kitchen island. Tsuru is looking down in judgement, arms folded. Bitches are obviously talking about babysitting me ’til I’m sober, like I need their pejorative friggin–
Okay, okay. I’m going down. I’m letting them press my shoulders. Curtains drawn. Ring of candles. Dark, spooky room. Buttery flame between every girl’s knees. They’re folding me into the floor, and there’s a circle of people around me, and Connie settles a plate of lasagne between my knees and gives me a fork, and I take a mouthful then jam my dirty fork down her cleavage and cackle so hard, I spurt up little chunks of meat and tomatoey onion and tell my friends this lasagne is like seriously sooooooo goooooooood, you’ve totally gotta get some down ya.
They’re not laughing, my friends, and they’re not lit up much, either. It’s dark as a cinema in here. In front of my toes is that thing from, like, that movie . . . Glaswegian—Weegie—a Ouija Board, yah, that’s it.
“Urgh, your turn, I spose,” Connie says to me, wiping between her tits with a piece of paper. “We’ve already gone. You ever witnessed the paranormal?”
“The paranormal,” I go, and snigger, and gulp my Smirnoff and cheesy pasta. “Is that what—we’re—conversating?”
“You heard her, byatch,” one of my friends goes. “Slenderman? Some of us’ve seen him. And Mariam said she encountered a fucking yeti, like for real, when she was volunteering in Nepal. Chulani, she got her door knocked on by a vampire. We all told our spooky stories. You don’t get to drunk your way out of this, girlfriend. Your turn.”
I look over at Tsuru. She’s too far away for me to grab her hand and squeeze. I can see her shrinking, folding, packing up her joy, preparing to skip town.
I swallow, drain a cup of mulled wine, crumple the cup, play with the squashed, cracked plastic then toss it into the dark corners of the room.
“You sure you guys wanna hear this? Cause it’ll spook the shit out of you.”
“Just fucking tell us.”
The world is encased in ice. Our eyeballs lock for eternity.
“You can’t tell anyone this. Kay? So, when I was, like, 15—I skipped school, this one day—and I had nowhere to go, like, I couldn’t hang out at my mum and dad’s place, but, like, there was this creepy lecherous kinda dude, and I guess I went to his house and—”
“And you fucked him?” Connie goes, grinning. “Did you suck his dick? OH. MY. GOD. You totally sucked his dick. Tell us how disgusting it was, eeeewwwww, did his foreskin have, like, headcheese under it from like the 80s and shit?”
“No, I was with—” I look over at the only person in the world who shares my secret. Silent Tsuru has tilted her head, so her hair has fallen around her face.
It’s not a big deal, this thing. It’s public knowledge. It was in the papers.
Bloody Crime Scene; Landlord Missing.
Day Ten Without Body—Police Halt Search.
Property Magnate Staged Disappearance, Police Believe.
“I—I skipped school and I was—I saw this—”
“Spill it. What’d you see?”
“This—I saw this guy, he was going to hurt me, then this, like, it—it came out of nowhere, it just sorta—and I promised.”
“Promised? Promised what?”
“Promised I wouldn’t tell.”
Frozen clock. Everyone’s eyes are paused, bodies still, ears pointed towards me. I’m watching Tsuru unfreeze, prepare to walk out forever. If I speak, I have lost her, and no story is worth losing her. I’m up, I’m drunk, I barge the hat stand over, I leave the door open; the girls complain and call me back, but I’m sprinting down the fire stairs and I’m catching Tsuru just before she gets in an Uber. She’s slapping me, I’m touching my fiery cheek, she cools my burned cheek with her lips, then her tongue is on mine in the back of the Prius and her knee pushes into the cleft between my thighs, and we’re glued crotch-to-crotch, cold noses pressed into each other’s ears, we’re waddling into the room we share where there used to be two single beds until tonight, and I’m licking every secret scar carved into her skin, working upward from her knee to her panties ’til I hit the sweet spot and we drink one another.
3.
Our love makes years melt and decades dissolve. Years of arms wrapped around Tsuru’s waist at the kitchen sink. Years leaning into the cleft between her shoulder blades, resting my head there. Years cooling her down when Tsuru gets flustered with her hater-parents on Skype and slams the lid of the laptop down, parents who are all anti about her having friends, anti about her coming out. Anti-everything. I’m there when she’s had a bad day, and we lie on our bellies in bed and sip sake and eat pistachios and gasp at our seinen horror comics and say Omigawd, check this out. I’m there when she wants to share the bathtub with the only human she trusts. I’m there to snuffle kisses from her throat down to her thighs.
When I’m not drunk on love, I’m drunk on tallying and reconciling and filing. Accounting is a sensible career for me. I’ve had more good luck than I deserve, and it’s time I appreciated whichever god gave me my ally, my confidante, my co-conspirator, my secret wife at home. Well, a common-law wife since our marriage hasn’t been planned yet.
Every night I start getting mad at my reports around 7 p.m., and Tsuru walks up behind my swivel chair, lifts my hair, kisses my neck. We make love in every room of our house. We cool down and let our hearts relax. We catch up on years we missed when we were afraid all the time, running from repercussions.
We want children, and we want to get married, though we’re both not sure in what order we should get it all done. We go to see Fertility First, at that private hospital with the shiny tower. Our expert, Himesh, squirts moisturizer between his fingers then gets Tsuru to lie on her back. We hold hands with him while Himesh gets us to close our eyes and envision not the sperm and egg, not the birth, but the people we want to share our blessing with. One of the people we want to bless our child’s birth is the sperm donor. This is the only thing that matters, Himesh tells us: how the story of a person makes you feel about them.
Go with the story that sings to you, Himesh tells us.
Choosing a sperm donor from a catalogue is quickly completed in ten minutes. He’s chubby, he’s a web developer, he’s ginger, he’s South African, he’s terrible at stand-up comedy, his profile says, and he dresses up as Santa to make kids smile at Christmas.
He’s nothing like the beasts we grew up with.
Within an hour we have our future planned.
Tsuru works from an office pinned to our garage. She scours internet auctions and old ladies’ garage sales, buys antiques cheap, sells them online for a premium. She has an instinct for which things should be passed on quickly and which things must be sat on for years. In our spare room she keeps floor-to-ceiling glass cabinets, and in there, among the suits of armor and ebony carvings, are a crystal ashtray and a letter opener and a butter dish, objects with radiation on them, contaminated from some throbbing glowing chained-up locker buried under the back of my brain.
We put away savings, and we can afford to meet Tsuru’s parents’ idea of an authentic Shinto wedding, even though they mostly don’t want us to marry. We find a pure white uchikake kimono for meek, secretive, demure Tsuru. As for me, it’s agreed my uchikake will have a black stripe and an embroidered crane, a bird I’ve dreamed about for years. Connie can be the shrine maiden, the miko. She gets to pour the rice wine into our sacred cups. We sketch plans for our parents’ tomesode kimonos in case they agree to wear them. We source wedding cake makers, a party quiz on printed cards, games of minigolf and boules, cake, karaoke. A place with a tatame room. Tsuru knows special corners of Alibaba.com where she can get nuptial silver cups for us to drink our sake in the ritual of san-san-kudo. Rings, hair, makeup: all efficiently organized in a file on the computer of my reclusive, thoughtful bride-to-be. My fiancée. My lover who falls asleep with me at the kitchen table, our foreheads resting on fancy paper stationery.
*
After years of worry and angst and secrecy, it's finally week to go ’til we tie the knot. HEN PARTY, BITCHES!!! Me and Tsuru and Connie, Francine, Hannah, Grant from Xero, plus a couple of buddies from the LGBTQ+ community who won’t out us too much, seeing as Tsuru’s family keep going on about himitsu when they tell her off over Skype at 3 a.m. in the morning, beaming in from Niigata. Himitsu this, mimoto that. I finally have to use Google Translate when Tsuru won’t tell me.
Turns out himitsu mimoto means covering up who you are. God damn control freaks are obsessed with keeping Tsuru’s identity secret.
We want to party the pre-wedding tension off, except Tsuru has a tiny shrimp-baby growing in her tummy, so we’re definitely not taking her clubbing, not that she’d be brave enough for clubbing anyway. We decide to bring the party to her. Hen Night at our house.
Everyone—fucking EVERYone—gives us shit for having a hen night together. You’re supposed to be apart, they tell us. There is affection in their scolding, though. Big Gay Grant pulls me into the laundry and laughs under the weak light bulb. Tells me he’s honestly never met anyone in the universe that’s as close as us two. How’d you get bound so tightly, anyway? Did you go through the trenches together or what?
“We ripped off this, um, like we didn’t set out to steal his—” I stop. “Nothing.”
“Ripped off what now? ExCUSE me?! Sister Steals, you got a dark side!”
“THE DRESS!” someone is chanting. Hannah I think, pulling us out of our laundry, “THE DRESS, YOUR KIMONO-THING! SHOW US!”
“Yah bitch!” Connie is going. “You have to, you have to!”
They’re tipping out Tsuru’s closet of wedding prep, upending her hat boxes, while she protests, wincing over her belly-bump. Tsuru has a whole closet packed with kimonos. Gay Grant presses one against his body and parades up and down the house while my flustered fiancée chases him. Francine, pouring whiskey into her mouth, pulls stacks of comics from under our bed, and she and Hannah and all the bitches decide they loooooove Japanese horror, shit’s soooooo seriously gross, ewwwww, specially the tentacle porn, hee hee, plus the myths and legends.
We settle into a quieter zone, resting our exhausted drunken chests on the breakfast bar while the MDMA wears off, turning manga pages absently.
There’s not much conversation left when I finally pull down a bottle of sake and we chink shot glasses and toss fire into our tummies and go Mmm.
Everyone except Tsuru, who stands apart, hand on her pregnant stomach.
“So, that thing you were gonna tell us,” Connie goes. “C’mon Suze. It’s time. Fess up.”
“What thing?”
“The thing that happened on the day you skipped school, dumbass. You’ve kept us waiting for, like, Gawd, how long?”
Spear in my heart. I stagger back an inch. The alcohol turns horrid on my tongue.
I haven’t thought about The Thing in years.
There are eight eyes boring into me. Eight eyes across four heads.
Not my girl’s eyes. Over against the wall, Tsuru’s head is bowed. Crushed. Turned down. Ashamed, as if she’s preening her belly-feathers. Typical Tsuru. Hiding secrets.
My friends have been waiting a decade for my story, though. They’re important to me too. I can’t let Tsuru guilt-trip me anymore.
I stare down the hydroslide, then descend.
“So there was this day I skipped school, okay? It was like all misty, like pea soup. This was high school, right, you guys remember Year 12, I was like 16, and—sorry, Tsu—I totally hated Tsuru’s guts back then. She was like this hard-out preppy prefect.”
Tsuru has drifted to the edge of the room, like she’s about to leave. She won’t meet my eye. Two hands cradling her belly. Pigeon toes.
I down a shot of fiery Sambuca and shudder and everyone smiles. Connie is about to say something smart-ass, but my words come out first.
“So here’s me skipping school one day, Thursday I think it was—or Tuesday—and I’m dragging my feet. Y’know how it is? Like my parents were, like, super negative, and they totally wouldn’t support me in going back to bed for a day. So, I’m like doing laps of my street, at a loose end, y’know, trying to think up a place to go and, like, self-harm. But who do I see coming up the motherfucking street? Tsu! ’Cause her family lived like half a mile down from me! And she’s being a badass as well, which I didn’t know at the time.”
Connie slides another Sambuca along the bar top. It’s my fifth, I think. Or fifteenth. Things aren’t adding up, my eyes are lying, ’cause I could swear Tsuru was against the wall ten seconds ago, looking immaculate in silver and pink, sulking, studying us, and now she must be in the next room. Gone somewhere. Vanished.
“So, Tsu drags me into this, like, creepy paedo rich guy’s house, and that’s cool, kind of, ’cause we need a place to hang so truancy doesn’t get us. But then he, like, starts feeling me up and pushes me down in his bed, and I’m like WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, and then he starts having a heart—”
“Suze?”
“His body was, like, jiggling, like electrocution sorta thing. Convulsions, y’know? ’Cause he got sta—I mean, he was gonna rape us and he, like, he fell on a knife, I mean, not even a knife, like those sharp things you use to open wine, it wasn’t our fault, he—”
“Holy… Did you take him to the hospital?”
“It grabbed him. This thing, this bird did. Grabbed him with its, like, beak and it—I can’t even say it.”
I’m shaking so bad, I splash Sambuca up my wrist. The sleeve of my blouse stinks.
“I’ll just shut up now. I wasn’t supposed to tell. I pr—promised I wouldn’t say nothing. I said I’d—I wouldn’t.”
“But you did.” Connie looks like a judge, like a principal. There’s no jokiness behind her eyes. “You told. How you gonna be faithful to your wife, Suze?”
“YOU PROMISED.”
Explosions in the whitewall. Plaster dust in Grant’s eyes. Knocked bottles. Screams. My friends duck under the table. The bird’s wide wings scrape the edges of the hallway, knocking picture frames as it crunches towards us, crushing the floorboards. Its head bursts the lightbulbs in the ceiling. The bird fills the room, shunting our dining table into the wall, pulverizing pot plants, scattering cat biscuits.
Fishy rancid rotten seaweed breath melts my eyes. I’m looking into a tongue big and red as a steak, a throat as black as a sea cave.
Its beak is huge enough to swallow me in a single gulp.
“YOU PROMISED YOU’D NEVER TELL.”
The crane pecks Connie first. Gobbles, actually. Devours. The crane gulps Connie out of existence, seizing all her body except her shoes. I can make out the shape of Connie’s hands and knees and screaming mouth as she presses against a bulging blue throat-sack.
Grant dives into the kitchen, crawls like a cockroach, tries to escape out the cat flap. The crane steps on his left leg with its rubbery foot, big and webbed as a kite. It pulls Grant’s leg from his hips with the sound of torn paper, leaving a hole, a circle of white bone and gristle hiccupping blood.
While I scream and weep and shiver, the bird gobbles up my friends, snapping and swallowing, shuffling awkwardly in the cramped room, its beak as long as a coffin, its vast bunched wings cracking every window it bumps.
Francine has a head one moment. Next, the beak snatches it off, then tugs her arms out of her torso. She smacks against the wall like a tossed banana peel, falls headless into the washroom.
The bird pulls Hannah to pieces in frantic, rushed snatches. Pecking.
When there are no witnesses left to eat, the bird takes six thudding, stomping waddles to adjust its feet in the too-small room until it is facing me. One black basketball-eye on each side of its beak.
It presses me against the wall. Hot intimate reeking salt-breath puffs out from its nostrils, steaming my face. Something trickling. Moisture in my eyes. Fish-stink.
The mouth opens. The tongue lifts and flaps like a flounder. The throat pinches as it struggles to form words.
“You promised.”
As the bird lowers its beak and preens its belly, snuffling, mournful, I sink to the floor. As it rummages in its tummy feathers, my eyes wince and stretch and bend. It finds the spot where our baby resides, around its belly button. I pray for death. Get me out of this.
But I live. I live and watch her peck her belly ’til her flesh gives way and a torrent of pink water spews onto the floor. I watch her pull a tadpole-thing from her insides, hold the twisting fetus aloft as it spatters the ceiling fan with juice. I watch the crane bite our baby in half then suck the meat into its gullet.
The bird turns, waddles into the lounge, jams its beak into the French doors, shatters the glass and wood with a few flicks of its head, tossing the doors onto the lawn.
It moves out into the sucking cold air, the wet grass, green below, black above, lit only by light leaking from our kitchen.
Tsuru spreads her wings, rattling the apple tree, smashing the pergola.
Our wedding vows, our invitations, stacks of menus spin in a whirlwind. Each flap of feathers sends paper flying, our home tornadoed.
Then, she’s gone.
*
*
The Devil Took Her: 12 tales of horror. Buy it on Amazon Kindle.