After giving birth to triplets, their exhausted mother lay down on the couch and fell into a deep sleep. Thus the triplets were left to their own devices.

When it was time to go to school, the Doctor went dressed in a long white coat, with the collar of his crisp white dress shirt and knot of his blue silk tie peeking out the top. He wore jeans instead of slacks because he was still in possession of a little boy’s body, a stocky one at that.

As kids, we were always getting in trouble—fights with other neighborhood kids and bad report cards and petty arson, and for the most part Mom took it in stride. But there were times when we pushed her too far, and that was when our middle names would come out. “Alexander Lawrence Hidecress,” she’d say, and my back would stiffen reflexively, sweat beading on my face.

About a year ago, a friend suggested I audition to be Donald Duck in Disneyland. He said it calmly at first, but when I expressed reluctance he adopted a more insistent tone. “You’re a five-foot-tall duck. Your name is Donald. What the hell else are you going to do?”

“We need five words from you,” the acquisitions orangutan said.

Webley gnashed his teeth. “Does it have to be five?”

“Five.”

“Exactly five?”

“Five exactly.”

“I’ve got some great stuff in the one-hundred-word range.”

“Not concise enough,” the orangutan said.

High Master Seamus was not a power-hungry sociopath, as agreed upon by his sizeable cult.

See him!

A severe, potbellied figure, never without a djellaba and skullcap, Seamus was not mocked. The superman was a gravity well of ego, as only the self-assured can be, as to shout the loudest, and condemn the sharpest, and inspire submission by brow configuration alone. For Seamus, these things constituted truth, without question. When he was jailed, it only proved his holiness.