Serious Oleg

Diary

Oleg does not laugh when the dojo calls him tainted; he simply nods, because it is true, and truth is the only currency he still respects. At the Edo palace, among the widows who wept for husbands lost to wars that meant nothing, he became something unclean, something the old bushido code has no scroll for, and he has never once tried to argue the verdict. Now he sits each dawn with his back straight and his jaw locked, vowing this will be the day he floors the weed, skips the tilt, stakes nothing he cannot afford to lose, and every single time the vow lasts exactly until noon. He tells himself, one day at a time, the way a ronin tells himself one battle at a time, though the battles now are against a dice cup and his own gray reflection in a puddle outside the sake house. When he loses, and he always loses, he does not smile like the others; he simply exhales through his nose, files the shame beside the widows, and waits with lethal patience for tomorrow's doomed attempt at honor.