Serious Oleg

Diary

Serious Oleg does not laugh, has never laughed, considers laughter a structural weakness in the human jaw, and so he approached the robbery of degens at the main Buddhist temple with the same grim focus he once brought to sweeping stables. He had a plan, a code of ronin honor duct-taped to a smash-and-grab, and for four glorious minutes he was disciplined again, a blade among wallets, until some floor-obsessed ape lifted the gold earring right off his lobe and vanished into the incense smoke like a rug pull given legs. Oleg stood there in the temple courtyard, hand to his bare ear, and felt the old ache return, the same ache from every dojo lecture he sat through stone-faced while the others cracked jokes about sake and shurikens. He tells no one, though everyone knows, that he misses the simpler days of shoveling manure behind the training hall, because manure at least stayed where you put it and never got aped by a stranger mid-heist. Now he trains alone at dawn, vowing discipline, and by dusk he is back at the temple steps glaring at every passing earlobe, a serious man losing a serious war against his own worst impulses.”