Fat Bob

Diary

They called him Fat Bob before he'd earned a single scar, and he spent thirty years making the name into a threat instead of a joke, proving it right one busted jaw at a time. The night everyone remembers is the dojo latrines, where he cornered a pack of bandits between the buckets and the stink and left with knuckles split to the bone and a grin that never left his face, humble as ever about the whole thing, like he'd just won a coin flip instead of a brawl three men wide. These days he's a hermit out past the treeline, telling himself he's rebuilding discipline, meditating at dawn, only touching the good stuff on weekends, and mostly failing, because dawn keeps arriving before he's awake and the weed jar keeps emptying faster than the sake ever did. He still trains his hands on a rotting post out back, bloodying them fresh just to remember what useful pain feels like, and swears each time it's his last apeing into old habits before the real comeback starts. Ask him how the hermit life's going and he'll laugh that big soft laugh, pat his gut, and admit the floor for his own self-respect keeps dropping, but hey, at least the bandits still cross the road when they see him coming.