Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

Sometimes that’s what happens. No cigarette burns, no bone snaps. Just an irretrievable slipping.

There are different kinds of hunting, I know now. The gentleman hunter with visions of Teddy Roosevelt and big game, who retires from a day in the field with a crisp gin and tonic, is not the hunter I grew up with. The boys I knew, who began young, were blood hunters. They sought that fatal jerk of a shot-spun animal, fleeing silky as water one second, then cracked to one side by their bullet.

Sometimes it is all too loud.

The Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’

I was desperate to remain asleep, but the day kept bobbing through.

A scattering of friendly acquaintances who probably hadn’t noticed I’d been gone.

home held no comfort either.

I’d prefer a snapshot of Warren Harding’s wife, “the Duchess,” who recorded the smallest offenses in a little red notebook and avenged herself accordingly.

Today I like my first ladies with a little bite.

drank more vodka. There was nothing I wanted to do more than be unconscious again, wr...

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.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh.

Cutting like a child along red imaginary lines. Cleaning myself. Digging in deeper. Cleaning myself.

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

I can’t stand to look at myself without being completely covered.

Someday I may visit a surgeon, see what can be done to smooth me, but now I couldn’t bear the reaction. Instead I drink so I don’t think too much about what I’ve done to my body and so I don’t do any more. Yet most of the time that I’m awake, I want to cut.

All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof.

who cut herself above the thigh so no one would notice.

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.

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

“I will never understand where your penchant for ugliness comes from. Seems like you have enough of that in your life without deliberately seeking it out.”

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.

I was lovely to look at, as long as I was fully clothed.

We all know each other’s secrets. And we all use them.”

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.

We may be small, but we can drink most towns under the table.

I’m here, I said, and it felt shockingly comforting, those words. When I’m panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I’m here. I don’t usually feel that I am.

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

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

How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow.

A girl who slices herself open isn’t the first on the list for tough assignments.

Because that means the day has ended. I like checking days off a calendar—151 days crossed and nothing truly horrible has happened. 152 and the world isn’t ruined. 153 and I haven’t destroyed anyone. 154 and no one really hates me. Sometimes I think I won’t ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. Three more days to get through until I don’t have to worry about life anymore.

She’d always been one of those girls who wanted what anyone else had, even if she didn’t want it.

I certainly could sympathize with a life that didn’t turn out as planned.

That’s how I’d stay, my insides unused. Empty and pristine. I pictured my pelvis split open, to reveal a tidy hollow, like the nest of a vanished animal.

“I know. It’s just that I’m wondering why you’ve decided to be nice to me now.” “Sometimes I can’t. But right now, I can. When everyone’s asleep and everything’s quiet, it’s easier.”

“You’re so hateful.” “I learned at your feet.”

When I’d been sad, I hurt myself. Amma hurt other people.

When I’d wanted attention, I’d submitted myself to boys: Do what you want; just like me.

“I don’t know that anything would be any good anywhere, so it’s hard to gauge if this is better or worse, you know what I mean?” “Like: This place is miserable and I want to die, but I can’t think of any place I’d rather be,”

Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.

People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.

Bear gifts if you can’t bear anything else.

“Safer to be feared than loved,”

My serotonin levels, so jacked up from the drug the night before, had plummeted, and left me on the dark side.

Angel or devil or both, right?”

“Sweet Camille, a beautiful girl can get away with anything if she plays nice. You certainly must know that. Think of all the things boys have done for you over the years they never would have done if you hadn’t had that face.

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

Daydreams can be dangerous.”

“Sleeping Beauty.” To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.