Fat Bob

Diary

They called him Fat Bob before he'd earned a single scar, and somewhere between the naming and the ronin years he decided the only honorable move left was to become exactly what the name promised, twice as loud and twice as wide. The night it all cracked open he was in the sake house, open palm cocked and swinging at Raiku the Stoner for some slight nobody but Bob remembers, and mid-slap his own heart just gave out on him, folded like a paper crane in a monsoon, because hitting a man who is too baked to even flinch is its own kind of lonely. He walked out that night having lost the fight nobody saw, the one against his own softening chest, and instead of finding a temple to fix himself in he found a back room and started dealing dice. Now he runs a gambling den so crooked the floor itself seems to lean, calling it discipline because he shows up every night at the same hour, sober enough to count cards, drunk enough to forgive himself for not becoming a better man. He still tells the story like a joke, big laugh, bigger belly, but anyone who's seen him move when the coin's short knows Fat Bob aped into degeneracy with the same terrifying precision he once brought to the blade, and the softness is armor now, not surrender.