The Hand that Feeds
This story was written from the 3 word prompt on Tik Tok: "Leather, Peckish, Brusque"
There it was again. Same pain. It was in the same spot as it always was: the back of her left hand. Right where the tattoo was.
What now? Why was it hurting? She wasn’t even doing anything!? What did it want from her now? Maybe it was biting her because...
Cause it knew what she was planning to do tonight.
Madilynn Hill was laying on her bed when it happened. Too tired to move. Her mind so close to breaking. So hungry but unable to eat.
It wouldn’t let her.
Her bedroom was a disaster. Piles of dirty clothes. Cigarette butts on the carpet spilling out from overflowing ashtrays. Empty bottles of Fireball all over the place. She didn’t know why the tattoo was doing it to her now. What had she done? She’d barely eaten anything in days. Was it going to take away the only things she had left now? Until she just withered away?
She would die if this kept up. She’d die soon. She’d tried everything that she could think of...except one thing. She could never do that. That is what she thought last night. And the night before that. But tonight? Tonight it didn’t seem so bad. Tonight it seemed like the only logical thing to do. The thing she had to do. The thing she wanted to do.
But she would have to get a little more drunk before she did it.
After fishing through piles of empty plastic bottles for a minute and finding a full one, Madilynn drank another shot of the cinnamon whiskey and felt sick to her stomach from it. She used to love Fireball but now (after tonight) she was never going to drink it again for the rest of her life.
The stale smell of cigarette smoke clung to everything in the room but Madilynn was so used to it by now that she barely noticed it. It even clung to her clothes, which was not an easy thing to do, since she’d been wearing what seemed like 90% leather for the last year or more.
It was the middle of the summer and hot as hell outside (and in her room) but she felt cold chills over her weak body. She’d been in a cycle of doing coke and drinking coffee in the morning, so that she could actually think or do anything. And then drowning herself with booze at night to fall asleep and kill the hunger and fear. But now she felt hollow. Dead inside.
The taste in her mouth would’ve made anyone that kissed her sick. Ash and whiskey. That’s all that she’d been allowed to have for the last few days. Fucking cigarettes and whiskey. She couldn’t even brush her teeth anymore, because she wasn’t allowed to use the green toothbrush. And she wasn’t allowed to leave her house to get a new one. She thought about texting Owen or one of the others to bring her a new one—but things had gotten so much worse now, in just a couple of days. If any of them saw her now...
She’d been alone in here for three days now. At least she thought it had been three days since Owen showed up asking for her. It was hard to tell in this hungry and frightened daze.
Owen hadn’t understood what she was saying. No one understood her. They worried about her, tried to tell her what to do, how to fix it. But they never heard her. It wasn’t an eating disorder. It wasn’t the coke. It wasn’t any of that.
You’re not getting it you stupid bastard. I want to eat. Good God I want to fucking eat!!! So...hungry...
But she couldn’t.
Because it wouldn’t let her eat.
It did, at first. It would let her eat some things. But bit by bit it limited what she could eat. One thing at a time, it was taking everything away from her. It started with the food. It still was mostly food stuff. But there was some other stuff too. Little things that she had to do (or couldn’t do, more often than not), but it was mostly the food stuff that had her going crazy.
It started the same day she got the tattoo. It was a celebration of finishing the recording on their first album. To remember the moment they were all going to get tattoos. Not matching ones or anything like that. Just something to commemorate the accomplishment. Madilynn’s was a crow. She knew it was going to be a crow before they’d even decided that the whole band was getting the tattoos. She even knew exactly where the tattoo was going to be on her body: the back of her left hand. It wasn’t something she was planning (though at the time she did have plans for about twelve different tattoos she wanted to get). This idea had come to her in a single flash of inspiration.
She went to the same tattoo parlor in Broadshore Village just outside of Indianapolis. Mystik Ink. She’d gotten her last two tattoos there: the stoned Squidward on her leg and the snake on her shoulder. But when she went to get the crow done a month and a half ago, Jessi (the badass chick who’d done the other two) wasn’t there. On vacation or something—Madilynn couldn’t remember. So she’d gotten the new guy, Tripp. He seemed dope enough. Didn’t talk much. But nothing really off about the dude.
And his concept sketch was sick. So Madilynn hadn’t felt any issue with going with him. Plus, impulsive as she always was, she had to get the tattoo that very day. No fuckin waiting. She was always the type where, if she went to the store to buy herself something (say a particular book she wanted) and the store didn’t have that thing, you could be damn sure that she was still leaving with something else.
So Tripp gave her the crow. It turned out great. Better than she had expected it to. It was creepier than she thought it would look, somehow sickly-looking or demonic or something. But she kinda dug it even more that way. She paid Tripp the cash for the job and then a pretty decent tip too. Then she left to meet up with the rest of the band at the Mexican place off of 62nd Street. One of her favorite spots. Never had any problems there. Ever.
Until that night.
They got the chips and salsa at the start. Ordered some beers and shots of tequila. Those went down easy. But when she grabbed a chip and went to dunk it into the salsa, she got this pain in her hand. It was so sharp and sudden that she dropped the chip and winced.
It was right where the tattoo was and felt worse than a pinch. It hurt more than getting the damn tattoo did! And those ones on the back of your hands weren’t pretty.
She’d had stinging from a fresh tattoo before. But this was worse. It freaked her out a little. But not much. Figured it was just the spot on her body with this one. Might sting a little bit more than usual for a while.
But instantly, already, she knew that she shouldn’t eat the salsa. So weird. Made no sense at all. She didn’t even try to make it make sense in her head. There was no point. And she didn’t really even have to convince herself of anything. There was no logic to it. No thought at all. It was just: okay...can’t eat that salsa. Let’s do another shot of tequila!
The pain, though...it kept happening. At dinner she’d decided that she wasn’t even hungry, so she didn’t order anything. Just hungout with the guys and kept drinking. But when she got home late that night, drunk and little stoned, she was starving. So she goes to the fridge to find some random junk to smash before passing out. Goes to grab the leftover fried rice from last night: nope. Can’t eat that. Pain in her hand. An understanding in her mind. Instantly.
Okay...so no fried rice. Let’s eat a bowl of cereal. Yes. That works. Cereal is okay to eat. But the fried rice is a big nope. She goes to put some milk into a bowl of Frosted Flakes...more pain. Instant understanding.
No milk. Just the dry cereal.
But whatever. She was hungry. She ate it anyway. Once she was full she crashed on the couch while watching some TV and had completely forgotten about all the weird shit when she woke up with a hangover. She follows the same routine she does every morning: smoke a cigarette on the toilet while she peed and looked at her phone.
And that was fine, until she goes to light her cig with the red lighter. Nope. Can’t do that. Pain in her hand and a sudden knowledge that the red one is bad. She can’t use it. Shouldn’t even look at it, really. And definitely never put it in her pocket or purse again. But the black lighter? Yeah—the black lighter was fine.
It kept going like that for days. She didn’t understand what was going on, but she learned the rules fast enough. She didn’t make the connection to the tattoo and the rules. She just thought that the rules were some weird paranoia thing that would probably go away after the next mushroom trip. Those always help clear her mind and re-ground her with the universe. And the pain in her hand? The tattoo didn’t look infected or anything. Looked fine. Fucking weirdo-looking and creepy. But fine.
As the days went on though, the rules got worse. Every single day there were new ones. Some days came with lots of rules, some with only a few. Mostly food. Can’t eat this or that, but this is okay to eat.
But then it started to take more away. It was giving her more and more rules to follow. And changing the rules that already existed. One day cereal is okay to eat (as long as you don’t put any milk in it), but then the next day you can’t eat Frosted Flakes. One day Bud Light in a can is fine, but the next day you can only drink Bud Light out of a bottle. Then you can’t drink beer at all, only whiskey. Then only Fireball whiskey.
Can only drink water out of the weird square coffee mug that she’d gotten in Mexico when they went there after their first tour. The one with the weird-looking robot on it. And it could only be water from the bathroom sink. No bottled water. No filtered water. No water from the kitchen sink, no water from the fridge, not even the fucking toilet water. Only from that sink and in that cup.
Eventually, the shit got so extreme that there would be days where she couldn’t eat anything at all. This was something she’d done before, but usually only when on a coke binge. Once she’d calmed down from that (after a day or two at most) she’d be left feeling so hungry that she would order everything off of the menu at the sushi place and eat until she put herself into a food coma and vow never to eat sushi again.
She started looking pale and gaunt when she showed up for band practice. She started feeling faint every time she stood up. She collapsed once, and that’s when the guys had a sort of “intervention” for her. There is nothing more annoying than a bunch of dudes that you’ve done coke with more times than you can count having an intervention for you. And she fucking tried to tell them: it’s not the fuckin coke! She wasn’t even doing that much of it. And the bumps that she did have weren’t even for fun. They were to help stop the hunger.
But they didn’t get it.
No one gets it when you tell them that you can’t eat something. They think it’s some kind of...disorder in your head or something.
They sit there, and they like to think: “She can eat that. She needs to eat that. She is doing this to herself, doesn’t she see that?”
Bitch I can’t fucking eat!
They don’t. Fucking. Get it.
Madilynn knew there was something wrong with her. But she couldn’t figure out what it was. The guys think it’s just the coke—it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t that.
She would put all kinds of food out on the table and scream at herself to just eat the fucking food.
But she couldn’t do it.
It got so bad that she even reached out to her old therapist from when she was a teenager. Mom had made her go to the sessions after getting caught with Adderall pills at school and getting expelled. She was lucky that expulsion and therapy was all she got. Back in those days, she fucking hated the prick. But shit was so bad now...she didn’t know what else to do.
She felt like she was going crazy.
So she went. It hurt like a fucking bitch, too. Her hand. The tattoo. It didn’t want her to go. She was breaking one of its rules when she did it. And she didn’t want to. Fuck she didn’t want to. The way that the thing worked, it was like when it gave you a rule, it wasn’t just its rule, it was now also your rule.
When it said, don’t eat the leftover fried rice, you knew that you shouldn’t. You knew that you couldn’t. You had no desire to do it. Even if you were so hungry that you thought you were going to die soon. You couldn’t fucking do it. You didn’t want to do it. You knew something bad would happen. Even if you literally knew that nothing bad was going to happen—you still knew that something bad would happen.
It didn’t make any fucking sense.
So she forced herself to go.
And it did fuck all for her.
Dr. Shaun said that it sounded like she was suffering from an episode of OCD.
He was wrong. It wasn’t the coke and it wasn’t fucking OCD.
It was that tattoo...
She realized that she’d been thinking that the whole time, but it was such an insane thought that she’d never even entertained it, let alone agreed with it. But that’s exactly what it was. The tattoo was doing these things to her. It was making her this way. It was giving her the rules and punishing her if she disobeyed them.
And the punishment for going to see the therapist was severe.
Not only could she not eat a damn fucking thing for two days after that, but other things started happening too. When she got home, Madilynn realized that there weren’t even numbers of DVDs in each shelf. Not only that but the titles were all wrong, too. It was so stupid. God. She didn’t give a fuck about the organization of the DVDs.
But it wasn’t about organization. Or even order and chaos. She’d lived her entire life in chaos. She fancied herself an emissary of chaos. She thrived inside of chaos and brought it wherever she went. But the DVDs...
They. Were. Wrong.
And they had to be right. They had to be corrected.
Not just the DVDs, either. The books too. They had to be corrected. That tattoo of the snake on her shoulder had an error in one section where the snake’s body overlapped itself when it shouldn’t have. This had been pointed out to Madilynn days after she’d gotten the tattoo, and it had never once bothered her. She thought it was funny. But now? The tattoo had to be corrected too.
She’d spent the night with a small razor that she normally used for coke, and peeled away the layers of skin that were wrong on her shoulder. She had to contort her body and use several mirrors to be able to see it correctly. But after two hours of tedious and painful work, her bathroom sink was dirty with blood and her shoulder was on fire. The tattoo, though...the tattoo wasn’t wrong anymore.
After that, she was finally allowed to drink herself to sleep. Thank God for that.
Next morning she woke up feeling dead from the hangover and her shoulder burned like hell. She did a few lines of coke to wake herself up and stared with hatred at the tattoo on her hand. She knew it all now. It was this fucking crow.
She chain-smoked as she thought of what the hell to do. Finally, she did one more line, then got in her car and drove to Mystik Ink. She demanded to speak to Tripp. Everyone there looked at her like she was some kind of meth head who was about to pull out a knife at any second.
Madilynn hadn’t looked in the mirror before leaving, but if she had, she’d have known that they weren’t wrong for thinking that. By this point, she’d gotten pretty bad. She was starting to decay. She started looking like a corpse that was only propped up by the cocaine.
They said that there had never been any “Tripp” who worked there.
“He is here!” Madilynn said, sounding more crazier than she had meant to. “He’s here! Go get him!”
The new girl behind the counter, a tatted-up blonde in a loose t-shirt and tight jeans looked at her with nervous eyes. She didn’t say anything for a second.
“Get him now!”
“I—” the girl said, her face going even paler than it already was from the fear. “I can check with the owner if you want?”
Madilynn let out a weird kind of panicked laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah go do that.”
The owner came out a few minutes later. She’d been here a few times but never met the dude before. He didn’t really look like the type you would expect to own a tattoo shop. Very clean. Very dapper-looking.
He told her the same thing the girl had told her. No Tripp had ever worked here.
“No,” she said. “No no no. I was in here a month ago and he gave me this tattoo!”
Madilynn showed her hand. The owner looked at her with an expression that said, “Lady, I’m about to call the cops.”
“I—I was coming to see Jessi but she was on vacation so I—”
“Jessi isn’t on vacation,” the owner said, his expression softening a little. “Jessi—I’m sorry to tell you this, but Jessi died in a car accident about a month ago.”
The world around Madilynn started going more and more insane as the days went on.
She scheduled an appointment to get the tattoo lasered off. Went to the first two sessions. It was working—which was good. What wasn’t good was that she had to break the rules to go. And the punishments had been quite harsh. But she made it through them alive.
And the tattoo had started to really fade after the second session.
That night she had to count every single black item in her house and make sure that they were all in order. She wasn’t allowed to drink, either. So she spent the night awake in an insane spiral, chain-smoking and counting. Rubbing her hand. She checked the tattoo again every few minutes. It was definitely fading. At some point, after all of the counting, the hours and hours of endlessly making sure that everything was how it was supposed to be (how it had to be), she eventually fell into something like “sleep.”
But in the morning, the tattoo was completely back to its original shade on her hand. It was as clear as it had ever been. But that wasn’t possible. She’d checked so many times last night. It was FADING!!!!
It was fucking fading!
She broke the rules one last time that very night. After doing a shit ton of coke, she took the razor and started not-so-carefully peeling off the layers of skin on her hand. It was incredibly painful, and she wasn’t sure if the pain was from the razor, or from the tattoo (because she was not only breaking the rules, but trying to kill it.)
When she was done, the back of her hand was a fleshy mess. And in that manic, insane state, she felt as though she’d actually accomplished what she’d set out to do. She’d actually rid herself of that thing.
Madilynn wanted to test it by trying to eat something. But by that point she was so near passing out, that she just laid down on the floor of her bathroom, smiling at what she thought was a success.
And somehow, she slept.
The horror she felt in the morning when she saw the disgusting thing that was her hand was the worst thing she’d ever felt in her life. But it wasn’t just the mutilation she’d done to herself that terrified her.
It was still there.
Somehow, over the torn skin and between the flesh beneath it, the tattoo was still there.
It was like it was mocking her.
You thought you could get rid of me so easily. You were wrong. I own you now. You’re mine. Forever. You will never get rid of me.
But that’s where it was wrong. She had a plan.
It was a crazy plan. But there was nothing else to do.
She spent the next two days trying to get the guts she needed to do it. Trying to get drunk enough to do it. It took time to get to that point. But after two more days of its rules, of not eating, of the counting, of the pain, it was time. That fucking thing wouldn’t be able to mock her anymore.
Not this time.
Because this time...this time it wouldn’t come back. Nope. It was done tonight. Everything was done tonight.
She just had to do it.
Madilynn downed another shot of the disgusting sugary whiskey and gagged. If there had been anything in her stomach, she would’ve thrown up. But there was nothing to eject.
She still felt like she needed to be drunker to do what she was about to do, but she also knew that she would probably never be drunk enough to feel no fear. So she decided that she would just do it and get it over with.
Now or never. And she wasn’t going to choose never.
So, now it was.
She dialed 9-1-1 on her phone. She spoke in a dead tone because she didn’t feel anything anymore.
“I’ve been injured and need an ambulance,” she said. Then told them her address and the details of her injury.
Then she hung up and walked into her kitchen. She found the big butcher’s cleaver that came with a ridiculous set of steak knives that Owen had got her once after seeing her cut a New York Strip with a butter knife.
She put her left arm down onto the little wooden cutting board she had (the only cutting board she had) and held the cleaver up above her head.
She breathed in and out for a while, just looking at her arm. The spot just by the wrist. She looked at it. And breathed. And breathed. She waited for the part where she would have enough courage (or insanity) to swing the blow. But it never came.
Just do it you stupid bitch. Fucking do it. DO IT!!!!
Madilynn screamed as she brought the cleaver down with everything she had. Pain exploded through her arm and then her entire body and her vision when pure white.
She didn’t collapse though, which was shocking. She stayed propped up against the kitchen counter, her arm still on the cutting board. When her vision came back, she had to force herself to look down.
The job wasn’t done.
Mostly done.
But not completely.
She was still screaming and crying the entire time. And blood was already spewing out like a firehose.
Somehow she was able to lift the cleaver one more time—bring it down onto her unfinished work.
That time the pain was surreal. But she felt it. She felt the job be completed. And that time she didn’t keep herself propped up. And that time, her vision didn’t come back.
When Madilynn woke up in the hospital, the nurses were shocked that she instantly asked for food. They tried telling her what had happened, what she had done, what was going to happen. But she yelled and yelled. Said that she didn’t care. She didn’t want to hear any of that shit. Not yet, not yet, not yet.
Shut the fuck up. I know what I did.
They kept trying to talk over her but she was persistent.
There was a lot of arguing, but eventually they brought her something. A bland-looking sandwich, a small dish of applesauce, and a drink in a styrofoam cup with a white straw sticking out. Not much, but she’d never felt so grateful in her entire life.
The nurses said that a doctor would be in soon. Wanted to talk. Tell her what happened. Madilynn barely heard them. She just wanted the food and now it was here. She picked up the plastic fork and tried to decide what to eat first. Wondering what was in that sandwich but not caring at all. She could’ve been given a dish made by Gordon Ramsey or a PB&J and they would both be equally as amazing to her.
As she waited, she kept looking around the room. Her left arm was in a sling, she could feel the bandages wrapped tightly around. Or maybe it was a cast. She didn’t know. But there was a stinging tingling sensation there.
(Not surprising, considering what had happened.)
She’d been avoiding looking at her left hand the entire time. She felt that she already knew what would be there (or what wouldn’t be there), so she never even bothered.
She knew full well what she had done. She knew the consequences. She didn’t care. It was life or death. She did what she had to do to survive. And she would learn to live with what she had done. Whatever was to come, it was better than where she’d been before.
The door to her room opened. A doctor came in. Started talking. Madilynn barely heard. Just wanted to eat.
So. Fucking. Hungry.
Staring at the food, she put the fork down. She decided to go for a big bite of the sandwich first. She was about to pick it up when she caught some words from the doctor that made her freeze.
“What?” she said.
“We were able to reattach it,” the doctor said. “It’ll take a good deal of time to heal, but you’ll still be able to use it You’re lucky. Normally can’t happen unless it’s a perfectly clean cut. But because there was so much of the tissue still intact and the bone wasn’t—”
The doctor’s voice faded away as fear and despair swallowed her. And she suddenly realized that she wasn’t in the mood for sandwiches or applesauce.
The End
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i <3 u all!
Mike DeFrench