Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

It’s one of those crummy towns prone to misery:

“Are you Robert Nash?” He looked suddenly wary. It was probably the first question the police had asked him when they told him his daughter was dead.

Only two men were needed to carry the shiny white coffin. Any more and they would have been bumping into each other.

Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents’ names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it’s the only way to truly keep your child. Kids grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.

That was the last time I had her full attention as a mother. I suddenly wished I’d been easier.

My body was heading into a flare. I paced a bit, tried to remember how to breathe right, how to calm my skin. But it blared at me. Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own.

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

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

Every phrase had to be captured on paper or it wasn’t real, it slipped away. I’d see the words hanging in midair—Camille, pass the milk—and anxiety coiled up in me as they began to fade, like jet exhaust. Writing them down, though, I had them. No worries that they’d become extinct. I was a lingual conservationist.

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.

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

“There’s not a speck of evil in you, sweetheart,”

Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach. She worries over people she’s never met who have a spell of bad chance. She cries over news from across the globe. It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.

A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It’s the kind of place that leaves a mark.

People whispered comfort about Marian being called back to heaven, but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.

“You know, I thought maybe she’d be a lawyer or college debater or something someday, because she was just … she never stopped to measure her words. Like me. I think everything I say is stupid. Ann thought everyone should hear everything she had to say.”

She gave Alison a big plastic bag of safety pins that she thought might come in handy, and when they left for lunch, I surprised myself by bursting into tears. The gesture—so random and kind—baffled me. Is this what mothers did, wonder if you might need safety pins? Mine phoned once a month and always asked the same practical questions (grades, classes, upcoming expenses).

I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me.

Even I, in public, was a beloved child. Once her period of mourning for Marian was over, she’d parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she’d trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I’d done to displease her.

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

“I just think some women aren’t made to be mothers. And some women aren’t made to be daughters.”

You can have a drink with Mother. With your mother.” This should be miserable, I murmured as I grabbed a tumbler. But underneath that, a thought: time alone with her! A leftover rattle from childhood. Get that fixed.

People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence.

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.

“You’ll never get over it,” I said. “It infects you. It ruined me.” It felt good to say it out loud.

He was smashed, swaying heavily, but 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.

“Her fingernails were painted. When they found her. Someone painted her fingernails,” he mumbled. “Maybe she did.” “Natalie hated that kind of thing. Barely even allowed a brush through her hair.”

Alan was sitting on the front porch reading a large, leather-bound book entitled only Horses.