A woman trapped in a coal cellar discovers that in order to live, part of her needs to die. A teen prankster’s vicious joke against her tutor brings revenge served cold. Cutting class turns terrifying for two high school introverts. A powerful-yet-paranoid publisher turns a young man’s magazine internship into a nightmare. And more . . .
“Michael Botur’s work grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go. His stories throb with what feel like real people, real conversations, real moments of pain and hope, misunderstanding and reconciliation, remorse and surprise.” —Maggie Trapp, New Zealand Listener
“Botur is a superb practitioner with the ability to bring to life these terrifying moments… It’s a little like a car crash, you don’t want to look – but you just can’t help yourself.” —Chris Reed, NZ Book Lovers
“Aside from the incredible inventiveness of its plot, Botur’s writing sings at times with fluency and vivacity. —Jenny Purchase, Kete NZ Books
“Botur is considered one of the most original story writers of his generation in New Zealand.” —Patricia Prime, Takahē 86
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After I finished reading these, I wondered where the author came up with his stories. The characters weren’t easy to warm up to. That’s no big deal for me as many authors I read kill off their characters so I wasn’t expecting a high survival rate. The scenes were graphic and could turn your stomach sometimes. Again. I read a lot of horror and came prepared for that.
What really had me liking this collection was the writing. The author dropped me into some pretty bizarre places. And he kept me reading even when I wanted to close my eyes. Some stories were short. Some longer. They all left a lasting impression.
4 STARS
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The Day I Skipped School
by Michael Botur
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Mr English’s 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.
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Michael Botur, born 1984, is a writer originally from Christchurch, New Zealand, who now lives in Whangarei with his wife and two kids.
Botur is author of four short story collections and published the novel ‘Moneyland’ in 2017.
Botur holds a Masters in Creative Writing from AUT University and a Graduate Diploma in Journalism Studies from Massey University, as well as degrees in arts and literacy.
Botur makes a living from writing as a columnist, corporate communications writer, blogger, advertising writer and journalist.
Botur has published creative writing in international literary journals Newfound (US), Weaponizer (UK), The Red Line (UK), Swamp (Aus) and most NZ literary journals including Landfall, Poetry New Zealand, 4th Floor, JAAM and Tākahe.
He has been making money from creative writing since the age of 21 and was in 2017 proud to be included in the University of Otago collection ‘Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 political poems’.
Botur has published journalism in most major NZ newspapers including New Zealand Herald, Herald on Sunday, Sunday Star-Times, as well as many magazines.
Botur has a long history of volunteering, including working with Maori and Pasifika literacy, Youthline, ESOL refugee tutoring, and assisting stroke patients, and in Whangarei is involved in improv theatresports and performance poetry.
Botur’s books ‘Moneyland,’ ‘LowLife,’ ‘Spitshine’, ‘Mean’ and ‘Hot Bible’ all available on Amazon.com.
In 2021 Botur was the first Kiwi winner of the Australasian Horror Writers Association Short Story Award for ‘Test of Death.’
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