Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE DAY OF
I’m so much happier now that I’m dead.
Technically, missing. Soon to be presumed dead. But as shorthand, we’ll
say dead. It’s been only a matter of hours, but I feel better already: loose
joints, wavy muscles. At one point this morning, I realized my face felt
strange, different. I looked in the rearview mirror – dread Carthage forty-three
miles behind me, my smug husband lounging around his sticky bar as
mayhem dangled on a thin piano wire just above his shitty, oblivious head –
and I realized I was smiling. Ha! That’s new.
My checklist for today – one of many checklists I’ve made over the past
year – sits beside me in the passenger seat, a spot of blood right next to Item
22: Cut myself. But Amy is afraid of blood, the diary readers will say. (The
diary, yes! We’ll get to my brilliant diary.) No, I’m not, not a bit, but for the
past year I’ve been saying I am. I told Nick probably half a dozen times how
afraid I am of blood, and when he said, ‘I don’t remember you being so afraid
of blood,’ I replied, ‘I’ve told you, I’ve told you so many times!’ Nick has
such a careless memory for other people’s problems, he just assumed it was
true. Swooning at the plasma center, that was a nice touch. I really did that, I
didn’t just write that I did. (Don’t fret, we’ll sort this out: the true and the not
true and the might as well be true.)
Item 22: Cut myself has been on the list a long time. Now it’s real, and my
arm hurts. A lot. It takes a very special discipline to slice oneself past the
paper-cut layer, down to the muscle. You want a lot of blood, but not so much
that you pass out, get discovered hours later in a kiddie pool of red with a lot
of explaining to do. I held a box cutter to my wrist first, but looking at that
crisscross of veins, I felt like a bomb technician in an action movie: Snip the
wrong line and you die. I ended up cutting into the inside of my upper arm,
gnawing on a rag so I wouldn’t scream. One long, deep good one. I sat crosslegged
on my kitchen floor for ten minutes, letting the blood drizzle steadily
until I’d made a nice thick puddle. Then I cleaned it up as poorly as Nick
would have done after he bashed my head in. I want the house to tell a story
of conflict between true and false. The living room looks staged, yet the blood
has been cleaned up: It can’t be Amy!
So the self-mutilation was worth it. Still, hours later, the slice burns under
my sleeves, under the tourniquet. (Item 30: Carefully dress wound, ensuring