Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

Curry loved to drill reporters on any topics he deemed pertinent—the number of murders in Chicago last year, the demographics for Cook County, or, for some reason, the story of my hometown, a topic I preferred to avoid.

“Now another one’s missing. Sounds like it might be a serial to me. Drive down there and get me the story. Go quick. Be there tomorrow morning.”

The sign was homemade, “Missing,” written at the top in bold letters that may have been filled in by Magic Marker. The photo showed a dark-eyed girl with a feral grin and too much hair for her head. The kind of girl who’d be described by teachers as a “handful.” I liked her. Natalie Jane Keene

Wedged in the foot-wide space between the hardware store and the beauty parlor was a tiny body, aimed out at the sidewalk. As if she were just sitting and waiting for us, brown eyes wide open.

“James saw the woman take Natalie. It was just the two of them, and they were playing Frisbee, and Natalie missed and it went into the grasses by the woods, and the woman just reached out and grabbed her.

“She was old.” “Old like me?” “Old like a mother.” “What else?” “She was wearing a white bed dress with white hair. She was just all white, but not like a ghost. That’s what I keep saying.” “White like how?” “Just like she’d never been outside before.”

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. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh.

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

For those who need a name, there’s a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them.

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.

“Give me a comment on record. But work with me off record. I won’t use anything you give me unless you say it’s okay. You can use anything I give you.” It wasn’t the straightest of deals, but it would have to do.

I remember trying out Dad once when I was little, and the shock on his face was enough to scotch any further attempts.

I remember my mother, alone in the living room, staring at the child almost lasciviously. She pressed her lips hard against the baby’s apple slice of a cheek. Then she opened her mouth just slightly, took a tiny bit of flesh between her teeth, and gave it a little bite.

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

“I think I finally realized why I don’t love you,” she said. I knew she didn’t, but I’d never heard her admit as much. I tried to tell myself I was intrigued, like a scientist on the edge of a breakthrough, but my throat closed up and I had to make myself breathe. “You remind me of my mother. Joya. Cold and distant and so, so smug. My mother never loved me, either. And if you girls won’t love me, I won’t love you.”

“You’re so hateful.” “I learned at your feet.” My mother lunged then, grabbed me by both arms. Then she reached behind me and, with one fingernail, circled the spot on my back that had no scars. “The only place you have left,” she whispered at me. Her breath was cloying and musky, like air coming from a spring well. “Yes.” “Someday I’ll carve my name there.”

“You didn’t hear this from me, okay?” she continued. “The girls, Ann and Natalie, they were biters.”

I could feel the night hanging on me like a soft, damp bedgown and I had a flash of the Illinois hospital, me waking up wet with sweat, a desperate whistle in my ear. My roommate, the cheerleader, on the floor purple and twitching, the bottle of Windex next to her. A comedic squeaking sound. Postmortem gas.

“Amma?” I sat down on the floor next to her and stroked her hair. I needed to be gentle. “Does she give you pills and stuff a lot?” “Only when I’m about to be sick.”

Amma and I were sick just like Marian. It had to be made that obvious to me before I finally understood—nearly twenty years too late. I wanted to scream in shame.

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

A flash of my mother, fingers wrapped between the fence wire, hungrily looking in. A flash of my mother in white, glowing white, holding Natalie with one arm, and a finger up to her mouth to hush James Capisi.

I am a nurse who has attended Marian Crellin for her tests this week, as well as several previous in-patient stays. I am of the very strong [“very strong” underlined twice] opinion that this child is not sick at all. I believe were it not for her Mother, she would be perfectly healthy.

Nearly got me fired. You never really want to believe such a thing. Like something out of Brothers Grimm, MBP.” “MBP?” “Munchausen by Proxy. The caregiver, usually the mother, almost always the mother, makes her child ill to get attention for herself.

“I think my mother killed Marian, and I think she killed Ann and Natalie. And I know you think that, too. I just got back from Woodberry, you fuck.”

“Let’s do it then,” I said. I swallowed the drink in a belt, peeled her hands from my head, and willed my voice to be steady. “I needed you all along, Momma. In a real way. Not a need you created so you could turn it on and off. And I can’t ever forgive you for Marian. She was a baby.” “She’ll always be my baby,” my mother said.

“Everyone has to leave the house, Camille. Put on some clothes and I’ll get you to the doctor’s.” “Yes, you need your evidence. I hope I have enough poison left in me.”

The most important piece of evidence was discovered under the cushion of the yellow brocade love seat in Adora’s room: a stained pair of pliers, small and feminine. DNA tests matched trace blood on the tool to Ann Nash and Natalie Keene.

On May 28, Adora Crellin was arrested for the murders of Ann Nash, Natalie Keene, and Marian Crellin. Alan immediately paid the punishing bail sum so she could await trial in the comfort of her home. Considering the situation, the court thought it best for me to take custody of my half sister. Two days later I drove north, back to Chicago, with Amma beside me.

swept out the contents of the dollhouse room by room, smashing my little four-poster bed, Amma’s day bed, the lemon yellow love seat. Once I’d flung out my mother’s big brass canopy and destroyed her vanity table, either Amma or I screamed. Maybe both of us did. The floor of my mother’s room. The beautiful ivory tiles. Made of human teeth. Fifty-six tiny teeth, cleaned and bleached and shining from the floor.

Others were implicated in the Wind Gap child murders. In exchange for lighter sentences in a psychiatric hospital, the three blondes admitted to helping Amma kill Ann and Natalie. They’d zipped out in Adora’s golf cart and idled near Ann’s home, talked her into coming for a ride. My mother wants to say hi.

Amma will remain locked up until her eighteenth birthday, and likely longer.

You can come up with four thousand other guesses, of course, about why Amma did it. In the end, the fact remains: Amma enjoyed hurting. I like violence, she’d shrieked at me. I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

shakers. I slipped a knife up my sleeve, and in the bathroom, I stripped off my shirt and dug it deep into the perfect circle on my back. Ground it back and forth until the skin was shredded in scribbly cuts. Curry broke in just before I went for my face.