Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

When I was a kid we called them fairy dresses, I remembered suddenly.

I’d like to say that I pity him, but now I fear I’ll never be able to pity again.

“Might be a homo did it,”

Yanking out twenty-some teeth, no matter how small, no matter how lifeless the subject, is a tough task. It’d have to be done in a special place, somewhere safe so a person could take a few minutes to breathe now and then.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should add that my mother owns the whole operation and receives approximately $1.2 million in profits from it annually. She lets other people run it.

How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?

The problem started long before that, of course. Problems always start long before you really, really see them.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow. Washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

We were body searched twice weekly for any sharp objects, and sat in groups together purging ourselves, theoretically, of anger and self-hatred.

It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach.

I’ve always been partial to the image of liquor as lubrication - a layer of protection from all the sharp thoughts in your head.

She was the kind of person who’d read street signs aloud rather than suffer silence.

“You can’t talk to her about the corpses of these two dead little girls, or how much blood must have come out of their mouths when their teeth were pulled, or how long it took for a person to strangle them.”

Then Jackie swooped down and pulled out the drawer of the coffee table. It held three bottles of nail polish, a ratty Bible, and more than half a dozen orange prescription bottles.

Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I

I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.

“Her fingernails were painted. When they found her. Someone painted her fingernails,” he mumbled.

All sharp objects have been locked up, but I haven’t tried too hard to get at them.