Gloomy Masumi

Diary

At sunset Masumi knelt in the dust behind the ruined dojo, cup in hand, drinking his own urine with the solemn precision of a man once trained to pour tea for a lord, and he noted, with clinical detachment, that it tasted exactly as bad as he'd predicted, because everything does. A rat scuttled past his sandal chasing a moldy onigiri wrapper, and he drew his blade in one motion older than his drinking habit and ended it cleanly, the way his sensei taught him to end suffering rather than prolong it. He watched the rat go still and thought, not for the first time, that discipline is just the art of doing the correct thing for the wrong reasons, and that he had mastered only the doing part. He set down the cup, wiped the blade, and wondered, in the flat unbothered way he wondered about most things, what could have been if the wars had never ended and he'd never learned that the floor beneath a man's life can vanish as easily as any liquidity pool. Then he refilled the cup, because a ritual abandoned halfway is worse than no ritual at all, and the sky did not care either way.