Weaning himself to starve desire.
It had begun not with a vow, but with an absence—the slow, deliberate subtraction of everything that fed the hunger. Not just the act of unaliving, but the rituals that preceded it: the surveillance, the planning, the cold thrill of certainty that another guilty man would soon be silenced. Kym had once mistaken that certainty for purpose. Now he knew it for what it was: user.
So he starved it.
He stopped walking the alleys at night. He stopped reading the police blotters. He stopped listening for the tremor in a man’s voice that signaled guilt. He poured out the whiskey that once steadied his hands before a reckoning. He burned the maps marked with red circles. He gave away the knives—not out of penance, but because he no longer wanted to feel their weight calling to him from the drawer.
Weaning himself was not a single act, but a daily refusal.
Some days were easier than others. On gray mornings when the sea was restless and the house groaned like a man in pain, the old hunger would rise—a dry ache behind his ribs, a whisper in the silence: There’s another one. You know where he lives. You know what he’s done.
But Kym had learned to sit with the whisper until it passed.
He filled the space with other things. Mending the porch steps. Brewing tea too strong. Reading aloud from books he’d never opened before—poetry, botany, old maritime logs. He even began tending the garden his predecessor had abandoned, coaxing life from soil that had known only neglect. The first time a rose bloomed under his hands, he stood there for an hour, stunned by the quiet violence of something beautiful growing where nothing had been allowed to live. Read my sci-fi blog: https://pepeperezblogoudepersonne.blogspot.com/
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