Some Nightmares Never End

Have you ever had one of those nightmares that won't end? You wake up and reassure yourself with a shiver that "Whshew! It was only a dream! The algebra test isn't today and I'm not sitting in class in my nightgown!"

That's kind of the way I felt in the week after Christmas when the picture above showed up in my Facebook feed.

"Remember what you were doing three years ago?" Facebook asked me cheerily, obviously not hearing my startled scream.

This is a picture of perhaps the most monstrous creature in my family's history. This aberration belonged to my mother-in-law in her declining years, the years when she wanted to have a real cat but was frail and terribly unsteady so we talked her out of getting a foot-twining feline. Instead, she bought an animatronic model that was wired to sporadically burst out with the most horrendously hoarse "MWORRRRR!" and creak its creaky neck and wave its scritchy tail and blink its evil eyes until you shrieked and threw holy water at it.

We were talking to Mom in the living room of her retirement apartment the first time this demon spawn went through its routine in the bedroom. I almost wet my pants.

"What the heck was that?" I gasped at the first MWORRRRR, trying to decide whether I should try to help Husband get his mother to safety or if it was every man for himself.

"Oh, you haven't met the newest member of the family, have you?" she smiled happily. "Isn't he wonderful?"

Thus were we introduced to Uncle Katt, and Mom loved him to exactly the same degree that I thought he was HORRIBLE. Horrible, I tell you. So horrible that when we were cleaning out her belongings a few months later, he still made me shudder. I put him into the pile of belongings that were going back to Iowa where Mom's great-grandchildren lived.

"I'm sure one of them would love to have Uncle Katt," I told my brother- and sister-in-law.

We laughed reminiscing about Uncle Katt when that brother- and sister-in-law passed through on their way to their winter home in Texas the day after Christmas. Hahaha! So heartily we laughed. Until the next morning, when their trailer had pulled out of town and Husband found this stray on the back porch:

Aaaargh! He's back!

Surely I'll wake up soon.

Also, this game is ON.