Diruktober Day 3: Leather

  Diruktober is a DIR EN GREY themed inktober challenge by re_be_ka_f. I chose to use them as writing prompts to join in on the fun. 

I no longer know how many days it had been. We’d been here for months and there were few of us left. 

Elaine’s daughter had died of the hunger and we ate her. Even if there’s not much meat, there are innards and bones. We made quick work of the meat and boiled the bones into broth. 

The surrounding wood had been completely depleted in everywhere that wasn’t too frozen over to access. 

As broth got closer and closer to water, I started to use the leather straps securing our shacks to cut into pieces and boil until they were soft enough to eat. 

“We ate a girl before we ate the leather.” 

“The girl died before we had to.” 

I didn’t know that it had been reassuring to a woman who had just eaten her daughter. In fact, I was certain it wasn’t. 

What torture it must have been, overwhelming hunger the driving force behind a lunge. Did she feel more entitled to the meal since the flesh had come from her loin? 

“We could have fed her the leather. She was but a girl!” 

My head was full of wails of sorrow that echoed in this valley in which we were stuck, turning my brains to hamburger. If only I could pick those parts out and eat them, too. First, Edward succumbing to his injuries and his wife soon after. It’s only fair that the weak help the rest of us survive. It’s our only choice, and when we are out of those, too, we will simply die. 

The hope of rescue faded more as each of us were picked off. Illness, starvation, cold, and now Elaine, who’s guilt caused her to strip and run into the icy forest.

Her screams of guilt were inhuman, shrieks of someone being murdered brutally could only hope to compare. 

 I knew she was soon dead, and we wouldn’t be able to get the meat. We only found fistfuls of hair with scalp attached in our tepid searches. 

That’s how I learned never to eat your own blood. First, eat the leather.