Igor The Bear

Diary

Igor The Bear does not wake so much as he arrives, like weather, and on the morning his honor cracked he arrived to find his own grandmother perched on his chest, spitting with the slow ceremonial precision of a woman who has buried three husbands and fears nothing with a mustache. He lay there under the old woman's judgment the way he lay under everything, an immovable weight absorbing an immovable will, and somewhere beneath the futon and the floor beneath that he felt the old bushido code shift its feet like it wanted to leave the room. There was a time, he tells the young fighters now, when a samurai answered insult with steel, when discipline was a blade you kept oiled and close, and he still tries, every dawn, to rise before the sun and drill his stances in the yard like his sword-master once made him. He gets as far as standing. Then the weed calls, the sake calls, the couch calls louder than any of them combined, and Igor The Bear sinks back down into himself, slow as a landslide deciding it's tired, muttering that honor is heavy too, and some mornings a bear just cannot carry everything at once.”