1 a.m. The house is dark; everyone is asleep. I become aware of several things at once: Mark is moving next to me, there's movement upstairs, and some horrible noise has broken through my sleep. Out of bed, I hear it again. It sounds like a child being tortured: a high-pitched scream of pain.
Before I can begin to imagine the possibilities that the sound holds, I flip on the downstairs hall light. I shout: "What is it?" Mariah comes down her stairs--I register, then, that she's not hurt, that she didn't make the sound.
And as I hear it again I realize that the sound that woke me was slightly different, involved hissing and scratching. As I hear it again I see Anna the cat leaping at the front door, fur pointing in every direction, tail fluffed, hissing and--yes, that's her--screaming at the black cat on the front porch, who is on the other side also leaping at the door, at Anna. A cat fight, with a door and a pane of glass in between the combatants.
Mark goes down and shoos both cats away from the door. I make sure Nick is all right (he seems, in fact, to have slept through it all, though he looks up groggily at me when I ask him if he's ok). Mariah goes back to bed. It's over by 1:05.
And your adrenaline was pumping until at least 3 a.m., right?
ReplyDeleteBummer!
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, we had a more drawn-out bad start: 4:30am Eli up; 5am Eli settled; 5:30: smoke alarm goes off (kids miraculously sleep through); 6am: Eli up for the day; 6:30 Ben wakes, saying that his p*n*s hurts and I start wondering if I'm spending the day at the pediatrician instead of the playground. Luckily, he seems to be fine and we continue groggily through our day...
And Zeke runs away from the door in panic when a bird lands too close by on the deck. He's run away and hidden when a raccoon or 'possum came....
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