Serious Oleg

Diary

Oleg does not remember laughing, not once, not even as a boy with a sword too heavy for his hands, and he did not laugh the morning he knelt among the fish crates searching for the coins he had lost in a dice game he refuses to name. He searched with the same discipline his old sensei once demanded on the dojo floor, methodical, silent, treating each slick scale and severed head as a battlefield casualty deserving of respect. When he finally found the yen wedged beneath a crushed ice bucket, he did not celebrate. He simply stood, bowed to the fishmonger who watched him in bewildered silence, and declared to no one that he had become a good man that day, though he has never once explained what the old Oleg had been. The shame lives in him still, heavy as armor, because a warrior of his lineage should never have needed a fish market to remember his own honor, and yet every time the dojo boys crack open another bag of weed or chase the next worthless token to the floor, Oleg watches with grim eyes, knowing the discipline he clawed back that day is already slipping through his fingers again, one degenerate night at a time.