But the sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human.
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In exchange for lighter sentences in a psychiatric hospital, the three blondes admitted to helping Amma kill Ann and Natalie… (They) held Ann down, while Amma strangled her with a clothesline she’d stolen from the neighbor’s tool shed. It took an hour to calm Jodes down and another hour for Amma to pull the teeth, Jodes crying the whole time… She spirited Natalie through the woods… the friends held her down while Amma strangled her. Again, she pulled the teeth herself.
pp. 247, paperback edition of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
“I’m Persephone. Queen of the Underworld. She’s married to that big dude. Hades. He runs Hell, but she’s in charge of punishment. But I feel sorry for Persephone, because even when she’s back with the living, they’re afraid of her because of where she’s been.”
Amma parked her cart next to a pickup and dusted herself off. Then with a businesslike beeline, she walked straight past the slaughtering house, past the lines of pig holds, those wet pink snouts squirming between the air slats, and to a big metal barn of a building where the nursing happens. Most sows are repeatedly inseminated, brood after brood, till their bodies give way and they go to slaughter. But while they're still useful, they're made to nurse - strapped to the sides in a farrowing crate, legs apart, nipples exposed. Pigs are extremely smart, sociable creatures, and this forced assembly-line intimacy makes the nursing sows want to die. Which, as soon as they dry up, they do.
Even the idea of this practice I find repulsive. But the sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. Like watching a rape and saying nothing. I saw Amma at the far end of the barn, standing at the edge of one metal farrowing crate. A few men were pulling one pack of squealing piglets out of the stall, throwing another pack in. I moved to the far side of the barn so I could stand behind Amma without her seeing me. The pig lay nearly comatose on its side, its belly exposed between metal bars, red, bloody nipples pointing out like fingers. One of the men rubbed oil on the goriest one, then flicked it and giggled. They paid no attention to Amma, as if it were quite normal that she was there. She winked at one as they snapped another sow in a crate and drove off to get the next pack.
The piglets in the stall were swarming ove rthe sow like ants on a glob of jelly. The nipples were fought over, bouncing in and out of mouths, jiggling tautly like rubber. The sow's eyes rolled up into her head. Amma sat down cross-legged and gazed, fascinated. After five minutes she was in the same position, now smiling and squirming. I had to leave. I walked, first slowly, thenm broke into a scramble to my car. Door shut, radio blasting, warm bourbon stinging my throat, I drove away from the stink and sound, And that child.
pp. 99-100, paperback edition of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn