Lee ate Pinkerwitch

Lee’s first act of cannibalism, the eating of his abusive babysitter whom he called the Pinkerwitch, turns a childhood failure of protection into the origin story of his appetite. As Lee recounts it to Maren, the event begins not with a sudden, unexplained appetite but with a pattern of cruelty, a broken promise, and a child’s sense that no adult is coming to intervene.

Circumstances and Background

Lee remembers the babysitter as a sadistic woman who tested him with questions and pinched him hard when he could not answer. Her quizzes included the capital of Mississippi and why a cow has three stomachs: knowledge he considered himself far too young to possess. She made the pinching look like ordinary playground accidents, such as a fall or a bang against the monkey bars. That concealment left the harm difficult to recognize from the outside, even as Lee understood that the punishment was deliberate.

He called her the Pinkerwitch. As an adult, he cannot remember her actual name; he guesses it may have been Pinker because she lived down the street. His memories of her are fragmentary but sharply sensory: he recalls her long teeth and the smile he hated, and describes her smell as stale and sour. He speculates that she was jealous because she could not have children, but presents this as his own uncertain childhood explanation, not as established fact.

The final day followed a familiar arrangement. Lee’s mother had to take baby Kayla to the doctor and could not find another caregiver, so she left Lee with the babysitter. As she departed, she knelt and whispered that this would be the last time he had to stay there. Lee says that his mother had made promises she did not mean before, and he did not believe this one either. His account places the act at the point where repeated mistreatment and the expectation that it would continue became unbearable to him.

The First Feeding

Lee says that something in him snapped that day and that he ate the Pinkerwitch. His account does not describe a planned attack or supply a detailed sequence of the killing; it centers on the experience of crossing a boundary he already knew other people would consider wrong. When Maren asks what the first time was like, Lee remembers a powerful rush. He says he felt, despite knowing how others would judge the act, like a strange new kind of superhero.

That mixture of awareness and exhilaration establishes a pattern that matters to Lee’s later understanding of himself. He does not portray the act as innocent simply because he was a child: he knew it was wrong by ordinary standards. Yet his recollection also distinguishes his experience from deliberate cruelty toward the babysitter. The episode emerges from abuse and abandonment, while Lee’s description of the rush shows that the act gave him a pleasure that did not depend on anyone else approving of it.

Concealment and Discovery

Lee remembers cleaning up after eating the babysitter. When his mother returned, she assumed the woman had left him alone and gone home. A neighbor later reported that the babysitter was missing, but Lee says his mother still never suspected him. The disappearance therefore entered the household as an unexplained absence, while Lee kept his involvement hidden and his mother interpreted what had happened through the ordinary explanation available to her.

The detail that Lee cleaned up is important to the event’s aftermath: even during his first feeding, he understood that traces could expose him. His mother’s lack of suspicion meant that the incident did not lead to questioning or discovery within the family. Lee recalls her saying that this was what happened to bad babysitters, a remark he associates with the way the disappearance was explained rather than with any knowledge of his role.

Meaning in Lee’s History

Years later, Lee recounts the incident while Maren asks why he ate his babysitter. The recollection gives her a concrete account of the childhood behind his practiced knowledge of what he is and what he does. Lee’s answer links the act to a caregiver who hurt him, a mother who could not find another arrangement, and a promise of protection he had stopped trusting. It does not make the disappearance less grave, but it shows the circumstances through which Lee remembers his first feeding.

The event also complicates the boundary between victimization and appetite. Lee describes himself as mistreated and left with the babysitter, but he also remembers the rush of eating her and the deliberate need to clean up. His story holds both facts together rather than treating the abuse as a complete explanation for what followed. Within a novel that questions the ethics and consequences of eating flesh, the episode makes Lee’s cannibalism intimate and social: it begins in a home-care arrangement, remains invisible to the adults around him, and becomes part of the history he eventually shares with Maren.