Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

Frank Curry thinks I’m a soft touch. Might be because I’m a woman. Might be because I’m a soft touch.

It’s the politeness that I find most upsetting.

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.

Sometimes it is all too loud.

The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions. Extra space is always good.

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

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.

When I’m panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I’m here. I don’t usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my way and I’d be disappeared forever, not even a sliver of fingernail left behind. On some days, I find this thought calming; on others it chills me.