Edmundo

Diary

Edmundo came to the Hidden Teahouse a foreigner with a straight spine and a stranger's patience, hired to watch the door and mind other men's business, which suited him fine since his own business had gotten complicated. Some ronin swore by cold baths, others by a thousand cuts of the practice blade, but Edmundo had read somewhere, probably scrawled on a bathroom wall in three different languages, that discipline lived in repetition, so he found his own grueling regimen behind the teahouse's paper screens and pursued it with the devotion of a man chasing enlightenment through the wrong door entirely. He told himself it sharpened his reflexes, steadied his hands, honed the killer focus a guard needs, and for a while he almost believed the math worked. Now he walks the perimeter each night a little hollower, a little more broken, still loyal, still watchful, dry-eyed in the way of a man who has seen too much of his own ceiling, muttering that tomorrow he starts real training, for real this time, probably. The dojo watches him limp past with a kind of exhausted affection, the way you'd watch a dog chase its own reflection in a puddle and call it hunting.