They Are the Hunters

by Faith Gardner

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

It’s a very particular flavor of devastation to lose a home, to lose everything you have in an hour’s time.

As he passes the paperback section toward the front of the library, he stops to gaze at a shocking red cover with a demented painting of a man on it. American Psycho. Seems like a sign, doesn’t it? He grabs it and adds it to his stack.

Compliments: the lowest-hanging fruit of friendliness.

Living with him is like trying to guess the next plot twist of the worst novel in the world. She has to constantly imagine all the scenes that could be written with her next move.

Man, the human brain is an amazing time machine, isn’t it?

Instances Where I Felt Nothing Where I Should Have Felt Something, he writes as a title.

She wants to take off her Croc and throw it at his head when he talks to her like that.

What Would Patrick Bateman Do? he asks himself half-jokingly.

She’s too weird to be normal and too normal to be weird.

She wants this all to be over so badly that she imagines just throwing a lit match in the middle of the carpet and running away to the hills to live out her days like a feral child.

Crying is a little like vomiting. Olivia does neither very often in her life. At the time, it’s the worst feeling in the world. But when it’s over, Olivia feels much better. Her face is drying, her cheeks tightening, and her nose isn’t running anymore.

She feels so warm suddenly, the way a cat must feel when it curls up in a spot of sunlight.

He walks up, ignoring the prickly feeling that there’s a presence right behind him. There’s no presence, he tells himself. There is no God, there is no good and evil, there is no afterlife, there is no such thing as ghosts.

You can tell a lot about a person by the books they keep.

How long those days seemed, how endless, how exhausting … and then suddenly those days are over.

Passion is a flame that inevitably dies. But loyalty burns forever.

Human beings are complex, indeed, but sometimes it’s just simple math. Subtract one person and the world’s a better place.

Sure, she doesn’t mind hurting people, but she doesn’t want to hurt people. There’s a big difference between having the stomach for horrors and having the lust for it.

ER waiting rooms are the fluorescent prologue to bad news.

Time’s not a straight line, but a path full of switchback turns. There’s a comfort to it.

Every godawful thriller he’s ever read has the line in it where so-and-so “released the breath they didn’t know they were holding” and he wonders if he’s merely a character in a godawful thriller, because that’s exactly what he does right now.

“I told you I gave her a sedative.” “What’d you give her, morphine?” “Morphine’s not a sedative.”

Here’s the secret they never tell you about getting everything you want: once you get it, you live in fear you’re going to lose it.

There are so many resources online about how to commit pseudocide—a fascinating little word that means to fake your own death.

no matter how clever she is and what she gets away with, she will never have this. This life will never be accessible to her. She’s only a tourist.

Everything changes all the time. It’s impossible to get her footing on a world that refuses to sit still.

“Do what makes you happy.” But what if nothing makes her happy?

“I love him so much.” “Like a flea loves a dog.”

“We’re not bad people. It’s just that sometimes, in life, you come to a place where it’s you or someone else. That’s nature. That’s survival. It’s simple math. You or them. Who do you choose?”

There were no such things as monsters, the monsters said.