Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

There was nothing I wanted to do more than be unconscious again, wrapped in black, gone away. I was raw. I felt swollen with potential tears, like a water balloon filled to burst. Begging for a pin prick. Wind Gap was unhealthy for me. This home was unhealthy for me.

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.

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.

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

The children in the woods play wild, secret games. The beginning of a poem I once knew by heart.

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.

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

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. The baby wailed. The blotch faded as Adora snuggled the child, and told the other women it was just being fussy.

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

Girls I grew up with, who never had the energy to leave. It was a town that bred complacency through cable TV and a convenience store. Those who remained here were still just as segregated as before.

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

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.

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

You’re crazy to think what you’re thinking. You’re crazy to not think it.

Sometimes when you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them.

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.