Serious Oleg

Diary

Oleg wore his father's earring to the ceremony atop Dojo Towers, and he wore it the way he wears everything, like a vow carved into flesh, and so when a stranger's fingers plucked it from his lobe mid-vow he did not laugh, he did not blink, he simply catalogued the theft as an act of war against tradition itself. The geisha, to her credit, kept smiling through the entire exchange of rings and threats, though the sake had already gone flat and someone in the back row was clearly betting on whether Oleg would draw steel before dessert. He did not draw steel. He drew, instead, a plan, grim and total, to found his own dojo, one built on discipline so absolute that no earring, no honor, no scrap of a man's dignity could ever again be lifted mid-ceremony by a common pickpocket. That dojo exists now only as a folder of extremely serious notes on a phone he also uses to check floor prices every eleven minutes, discipline apparently having rules for other men and mere suggestions for himself. Still he trains, grave as a tombstone, one ear bare and cold, sharpening a blade that will, eventually, someday, surely, be aimed at something other than his own reflection.