Let’s fry ourselves in oil together.
The words came from a man sitting on a rusted folding chair outside a condemned auto shop on the edge of Bakersfield, his boots caked in dried mud, his fingers stained with motor grease and something darker. His name was Elias, though no one had called him that in years. To the locals, he was just “the mechanic,” the one who fixed carburetors and kept quiet about the crimson in the back bay.
Kym Mûryer stood a few feet away, hands in his coat pockets, the desert wind tugging at his sleeves. He hadn’t come looking for another of the five. He’d come because of a postcard—no return address, just a smudged photo of a gas station and two words scrawled in shaky ink: He knows.
Now he knew who he was.
Elias looked up, squinting against the sun. “You’re Kym.”
“I am.”
“You look… softer.”
Kym didn’t answer. He’d left the cliff house three weeks ago. Since then, he’d slept in bus stations, eaten at diners where the coffee tasted like burnt wire, and walked through towns where no one knew his name. He’d thought he was running from the past. But maybe he’d been walking toward this.
Elias stood, joints cracking like dry kindling. He gestured to a dented oil drum behind the shop, half-filled with black, viscous fluid. “Used engine oil. Hot enough to blister skin in seconds. I used to think about it—after the third one. Just… climb in. Let it take me.”
Kym stepped closer. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because someone would’ve had to clean it up,” Elias said with a dry laugh. “And I didn’t want to leave that mess for anyone.”
Kym understood. The five hadn’t unalived out of cruelty. They’d unalived out of a terrible, twisted sense of care—trying to scrub the world clean with their own hands because no one else would.
Elias wiped his hands on a rag that had long since lost its color. “I heard you stopped.”
“I’m trying to.”
“Good.” Elias nodded toward the road. “There’s a girl. Works at the diner down the street. She’s got the same look you used to have—like she’s carrying a silence that’s eating her alive. She watches the men who come in. Not with fear. With recognition.”
Kym followed his gaze. Through the heat haze, he saw the neon sign of the diner flicker: Mae’s Place. Pie & Coffee.
“She hasn’t said anything,” Elias said. “But she leaves notes in the sugar jar. Names. Dates. License plates.”
Kym turned back to him. “You’ve been watching her.”
“Not like that,” Elias said sharply. “Like… I remember what it felt like to be the only one who saw.”
They stood in silence for a long moment, the desert stretching around them like a scar.
“Let’s fry ourselves in oil together,” Elias said again, not as invitation, but as absolution. “Not literally. But… in the mess. In the truth. You and me. We don’t have to carry it alone.”
Kym looked at the oil drum, then at the diner, then at his own hands—no longer the hands of a bad guy, but not yet the hands of a healer.
“No,” he said. “But I’ll sit with her at the counter. And I’ll listen.”
Elias smiled faintly. “That’s enough.”
Kym walked toward the road, the sun beating down like judgment. Behind him, Elias went back to his chair, the ghost of a man who had once believed fire was the only purification.
But Kym knew better now.
Some silences weren’t meant to be burned away.
They were meant to be held—gently, patiently—until they turned into speech.
And so he pushed open the diner door, the bell jingling like a promise, and took a seat at the counter.
The girl looked up from the coffee pot.
Her eyes said everything.
And for the first time in years, Kym Mûryer didn’t reach for a blade.
He reached for a cup.