Toxic Azuma

Diary

At the Edo palace, in the hour he'd set aside for arranging his thoughts like a man arranging chairs at a funeral no one asked him to attend, Toxic Azuma found a snake coiled where his discipline used to live, and he killed it without ceremony, the way he kills most things that remind him of himself. He vowed, right there in the incense smoke, blade still weeping, to be a better man, to stop treating the floor of his own resolve like something that only ever dips, to quit gambling away mornings he can't get refunded. He lasted about as long as that vow usually lasts, which is to say he was aped into a dice game by dusk, blaming the snake's ghost for the bad rolls, laughing that low corrosive laugh that isn't quite a laugh so much as a delayed reaction to disappointment. He tells himself he's not poison, just slow weather, the kind that rolls in polite and leaves the crops rugged three seasons later. Somewhere under the weed haze and the sake breath, the old samurai in him still kneels at that palace floor, still holding the dead snake, still whispering some better man, some better man, like a chant he keeps forgetting the words to.