Dear diary,
I step outside. It is now night; so I transmogrify into Doctor Bryan the Wolfman. Immediately a priest comes sauntering down the alleyway.
“Oh! Doctor Bryan, I’m so glad to find you here in this dark alley,” sez the priest, upon looking up and catching my glowing cat-eyes. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Yes, I am aware that wolves are more like dogs than cats; but, remember, Doctor Bryan is not just a wolf — he is a wolf-MAN.]
“Why are you glad to have run into me at night?” I ask this priest.
“Because you are a true physician, not like the frauds that one meets in the medical facilities,” sez the priest; “you heal not only the body but the SOUL.”
“So, is your soul ailing you, or what? Please get to your point.” I’m growing impatient with this fool.
“Yes! Oh, Doctor Bryan, I have committed SO many sins, and I have need to confess them to one who will feel a greater pang of conscience at hearing them than I myself am capable of…”
“Please, be quiet,” I interrupt. “Take this, and go in peace,” I hold the muffler out to the priest.
“Ah! A prophecy!” the priest is overjoyed. He accepts the muffler and hugs it to his chest.
“What you must do now, do it quickly,” I command.
So the priest takes the prophetic item that I gifted him, which signifies that I desire for him to muffle himself — not only in the earthly sense, meaning that he should stop pestering me with his talk on this fine night; but also in the heavenly sense, meaning that he should make his kind scarce in the world by committing self-slaughter.
I am pleased to find out that, immediately after our encounter, this priest ran and told his brethren in the church about my prophecy, and then he and all the clergymen who had ears to hear my message dashed out straightway from their cloister and hanged themselves from palm trees. And those who preferred to continue living simply quit the profession.
“Wow, I didn’t expect such uplifting results,” I remark aloud to myself while scrolling thru the news feed on my portable computing device the following morning and seeing reports of death rates skyrocketing overnight among the church leadership. “Good boys,” I say, as it were to the souls of these suicides.
Now, being that it is day again, I transmogrify back into Tolsteer-Yoshi, Gentleman. Continuing to amble thru the red-light district, I now enter a shop that makes submarine sandwiches. “Hello,” I greet the man who is standing at the sandwich-making station before he has a chance to greet me. He smiles widely. Then I ask: “The giant wooden sign hanging outside claims that you sandwich artists can make a sub any way that your customer desires. Could this be true?”
“It is true indeed,” the sandwich artist bows low.
“OK, terrific!” I say, acting in my daytime character of the gentleman Tolsteer-Yoshi, who is a combination of Leo Tolstoy and Toshiro Mifune. “Now, here’s a tough question: If I give you the specifications for its creation, would you be able to fabricate a horse — I mean, a real living horse, as opposed to a sandwich that I could eat?”
“Does the gentleman mean that he would like an order of steak tartare?”
“NO!” I shout, losing my temper. I grunt and pace back and forth; then I try to say calmly: “For once, I do not want to eat raw horseflesh — not right this instant, anyway. What I am asking is for you to gather all the ingredients that make up my bay stallion Mukhorty (who, by the way, once transformed into a human male, but I helped restore his equine nature by placing him on a strict diet of oats and eliminating the chitterlings from his snack trough — look here in my crystal ball: you can see how hale he is now, in his stable at my barn), I say, my desire is for you to combine these Mukhorty ingredients with the ingredients of my other horse called Sancho’s Donkey, thus creating the ultimate beast to ride upon. Do you think that you could do that? Or is that too hard for you?”
The submarine-sandwich artist opens his mouth to answer, but, before he can get a word out, I interrupt with the following clarification:
“Here’s what I mean: Instead of holding a piece of lettuce and a slice of tomato in one hand, squirting ranch dressing upon them, and then stuffing these things up a hole that you jabbed in a bread-torpedo, I fervently pray that you will use metal tongs to pick up the living memory of my horse that appeared just a few adventures ago, whose name, I repeat, is Mister Mukhorty (that’s what I christened him when I was just plain Tolstoy, before God fused my spirit with his friend Toshiro and we became the gentleman Tolsteer-Yoshi, made entirely of ruby glass), I say, take Mukhorty’s platonic ideal and graft it into the same glorious essence as the other horse, whose name is Sancho’s Donkey, whom I rode backward thru time from our Russian space station to Antarctica when I was Doctor Toshiro. Is something like this too difficult for you to perform? I’m willing to thank you, if you complete the job satisfactorily. Or would this type of request be above your paygrade?”
The sandwich artist stares at me for a few ticks of the clock — he’s probably making sure that I’m finished. At first, he appears suspicious; but gradually his face takes on the expression of one who is ready to risk his soul for the Dark Arts. And he replies:
“I will do this thing that you ask.”
Then he presents me with my hybrid, and I pay him in caesars.
“Whoa!” he sez. (He’s apparently never seen actual caesars before.)
“Yes, they shine,” I say. “Thanks for the sub.” (Here I use the abbreviation “sub” to mean “substitute beast that one might use for friendship and transportation” instead of “submarine sandwich”.)
I mount SorchyHong-MukDonk after blessing him with this royal name, which is a mixture of the names of his source-horses; then I pat his haunch, and we crash thru the double-glass exit doors of the eatery and gallop off into the moonrise.
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