The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

She had means, limited though they were: charms, talismans, ways to persuade evil to pass by your door. Unfortunately, however, these were not capable of easing the evil within.

“I don’t believe in monsters,” Stanton said. “Only men who behave like them.”

The beauty and frustration of nature, Edwin, is that it is infinite in its variations.

Funny how dearly we hold on to some truths about ourselves, the power these truths have over us.

For many people did not like the truth, it seemed—thought it was a dirty and distasteful thing, impolite and complicated. They didn’t have the patience for it—for numbers, liters, rations, portions, reasons. Many simply preferred the sweet, momentary pleasure of hearing whatever they wanted to hear.

But looking back, he knew, was a trap. They’d come this far. There would be no going back, not now, not ever.

his laugh was like water running over stones in the creek—fast and free and clear. She wanted to enter that laugh and to swim and bathe and splash in it, to drink it down and be cleansed by it.

The sudden clarity moved through him with the sharpness of an icicle—seemed to still his heart and uncloud his thinking all at once. The truth was like that, sometimes. Not like being saved, as his grandfather had once told him, but the opposite: cold and terrible and paralyzing.

Reed once thought that love was akin to passion, but he saw now that it was something different entirely; that it was, perhaps, a kind of faith.