Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.

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

Problems always start long before you really, really see them.

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

A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day.

It was commonly known that Annabelle absolutely hated her husband’s last name - she even crumpled up her nose when she said it. It never occurred to her that she didn’t have to take it.

“Actually I’d be interested to know what you all think.” A sentence they couldn’t hear very often.

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

One should have allegiance to one’s childhood things.

Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman’s body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth. Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? Cucumbers and bananas and bottles, a string of pearls, a Magic Marker, a fist. Once a guy wanted to wedge a Walkie-Talkie inside of me. I declined.

I would never steer a fellow sufferer from the relief of a blackout. Sometimes that’s the most logical route. I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.